#BRAVE Books

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

A Texas county has mandated public libraries move a well-regarded children's book documenting the mistreatment of Native Americans in New England — Colonization and the Wampanoag Story — from the "non-fiction" section to "fiction." The decision was made after the government of Montgomery County, under pressure from right-wing activists, removed librarians from the process of reviewing children's books and replaced them with a "Citizens Review Committee." Colonization and the Wampanoag Story was "challenged" by an unknown person on September 10, 2024. The Committee responded by ordering that the book be moved to the fiction section of public libraries in Montgomery County by October 17, 2024, according to public records obtained by the Texas Freedom To Read Project shared with Popular Information.  The author of Colonization and the Wampanoag Story is Linda Coombs, a "historian from the Wampanoag Tribe." Coombs spent three decades working at the Wampanoag Indigenous Program, an initiative to preserve the history of the Wampanoag people. The book is published by Penguin Random House, which describes the book as "[t]he true story of the Indigenous Nations of the American Northeast, including the Wampanoag nation and others, and their history up to present day."

[...] The change to the book review process was driven by a local right-wing group, Two Moms and Some Books. The group is led by Michele Nuckolls, a local mother. Nuckolls believes "children’s books with alternate gender ideology to be moved to the adult section." The group also is demanding more "conservative and Christian’s [sic] books in the public library." The group is especially enthusiastic about titles from Brave Books, which publishes children's books from far-right authors like Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Donald Trump's former press secretary Sean Spicer, and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. In case there is any confusion about the objectives of the group, its slogan is "Make Libraries Great Again!" 

[...] Under the new policy, once a children's book is challenged, it must immediately be moved to the adult section, with only adults allowed to access it. The book is then considered by the Citizens Review Committee at a meeting that is "closed to the public except for the Resident who made a formal request for review." The decisions of the Citizen's Review Committee are final, and there is no appeals process.  From the outset, critics of the new policy warned that it could be abused. 

Another disturbing instance of the right-wing book-banning crusade against content featuring diverse voices has occurred, this time in Montgomery County, Texas, directly north of Houston. The book in question was Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, which was moved from “non-fiction” to “fiction”

[shaxxophone]

Hey, just a heads up that will be important to know if you frequent your local library (in the USA)!!!

If you hear about your local library hosting a book reading for ‘brave books’ or ‘kirk cameron’ on august 5th— know that there’s a 98% chance it is not a library sponsored event.

Basically, kirk cameron is one of those ‘i need to win the war on woke!’ people who writes children’s books for just that purpose. He, in an effort to spread information about his books in the past, tried to hold book talks in which he broke library policies in order to do so (boy didn’t even try to reserve a meeting room)

….and he is now declaring his ability to successfully reserve meeting rooms and follow policies as ‘winning over the libraries that had denied him’ 🙄

Now on august 5th, he’s calling on people all across the country to reserve rooms in libraries to have these book talks about these books.

He’s saying it’s just to share the books but basically given his history of comments its clearly him wanting to cause tension between the public, and public libraries. Like a whole ‘i dare you to turn us down, and i dare citizens to get mad at us’ type of thing.

Public libraries are supposed to be 100% neutral. Just as we cannot and should not ban books, we cannot and should not ban anyone from our meeting rooms. The breakdown of neutrality will always lead to a bad path.

These events are not library sponsored however, we have not coordinated them, no effort on the library’s end has been put into them, and we are not advertising them.

A detail the people who reserved the room at my library are conveniently leaving out, despite being told they need to…

And now a counter protest is being planned for my library.

So please, if you hear or see anything about this happening at your local library, and you hear people getting upset about it, try to provide further context to them.

Often times, your local library IS a safe space. Librarians tend to be some super forward thinking folks, and many many library workers are upset about this, but we need to remain neutral to avoid legal issues.

The guy organizing this is just an asshole who knows that and is trying to make you think otherwise.

Here’s an article for more info if anyone wants it:

[archivlibrarianist]

"This isn’t about liberty. This is about selling $180 worth of books under the guise of taking back the library."

"This year’s August 24 events being mass-coordinated by anyone who wishes to set up a story time at their local public library are once again a ripe opportunity for all of these elements to clash and for right-wing “activists” to proclaim they’re being discriminated against by a taxpayer institution. Brave Books has developed a resource kit for anyone wishing to put together one of these story times, and they have set up a map for people to drop pins for confirmed events. Doing this inevitably connects the public libraries with Brave Books, and given how few people know the actual intricacies behind library policy — and indeed, with people of this particular persuasion not wanting to care about them — the flames are about to grow hotter."

As the article says: be prepared. Know your meeting room policies and have them ready. Speak to your colleagues and prepare them for what may come.

[canyon-of-chaos]

Drew that based vulture villain guy from the conservative 'kids' Brave books. He's my oc now and he's actually the good guy

Eyestrain warning (glitched ver below)

[wtffundiefamilies]

BRAVE Books and Ashley St. Clair have partnered together to tackle the intense topic of gender in our book Elephants Are Not Birds, which follows the story of an Elephant named Kevin. Most can see that there is a distinct difference between an elephant and a bird but in this story, we'll see that even those lines are blurred when the lies of Culture the Vulture are accepted as truth. Culture the Vulture convinces Kevin that his ability to sing is one that only birds have, so logically this means that he is a bird. The lies and logic from Culture the Vulture parallel what our culture is attempting to feed the youth of today. The story Elephants Are Not Birds arrives at a similar conclusion society will arrive at when it comes to the idea of gender identity, boys are not girls and elephants are not birds.

the worst thing is there's a tiny bit of truth here. just because someone enjoys things that society has gendered "male" or "female" it doesn't mean that their actual gender has anything to do with it.

too bad the whole point of this is to lead to the conclusion that "therefore no one is trans and gender is in your pants."

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[larissa-the-scribe]

guys I had this realization the other day that Redwall works really well for reading aloud, and kinda half-remembered something about the author reading to kids? So I looked it up to see if I had made a connection.

And it turns out, yes, actually, because he read aloud to kids at a school for the blind. But all the books they gave him to read were depressing. So he wrote Redwall, a story about heroism and courage and making it through struggles, and filled it with so many sensory, visual details so he could give them something better and I just-- that's so wholesome-- help

[hold322]

518 WGCBP | Follow the money to understand the B.S.

This week on The World’s Greatest Comic Book Podcast™: We remember Denny Laine, David McKnight, and Norman Lear. Can a kissing scene in a graphic novel lead to porn addiction? In Moving Pictures: Disney’s given up and announced delays. Doctor Who got more than 100 complaints. And who got renewed for new seasons? In Comics: Marvel cancelled an Avengers book. A Spider-Man title is hitting it’s…

[shyjusticewarrior]

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #19, Robin (2021) #5

[jessica-marie-baumgartner]

Taxpayer-funded libraries hosted drag queen events but refused to allow the promotion of a faith based book.

Now, we're taking them back.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Russell at LGBTQ Nation:

Kirk Cameron went on an unhinged rant this week, claiming that public schools turn kids into drag queens, strippers, and drug dealers. The former teen actor and anti-LGBTQ+ Christian author and advocate joined Conservative Christian author Elizabeth Johnston on her eponymous podcast Tuesday to talk about the so-called “woke mind virus” and its “radical attack on family values.” During their conversation, Cameron whined about allegedly being denied the opportunity to promote his Christian children’s books at more than 50 libraries across the U.S. in 2022, and claimed that America’s founders “hated the idea of a democracy.” Johnston went on to ask Cameron about his crusade to “expose” children’s book publisher Scholastic Books’ supposed “agenda to sexualize our children.” Late last year, the actor announced a partnership with SkyTree Book Fairs, a recently launched 501c3 not-for-profit organization that aims to provide an alternative to Scholastic Book Fairs, which it has characterized as promoting “sexualized content.”

As Book Riot noted in November, the emergence of SkyTree roughly coincided with the disappearance from the website of Cameron’s for-profit publisher Brave Books of information about booking its own book fairs, and former Brave Books head of finance and administration Riley Lee now serves as SkyTree’s head of book fairs. Brave Books has also promoted SkyTree Book Fairs via its social media accounts, and according to Texas Freedom to Read co-founder Frank Strong, SkyTree “appears to be primarily a distribution vehicle for Brave Books.” While Cameron has previously accused Scholastic of “pushing sexualized and gender-confusing content for minors into schools and libraries,” on Johnston’s show, he declined to talk about Scholastic beyond calling the publisher “wicked,” instead launching into a bizarre attack on public schools.

“What I think is more productive is to say, ‘What are we doing to contribute to the demoralization of our children and the disintegration of our culture,” Cameron said, positing that across the country, “Parents are complaining that their girls are coming home strippers and their boys are drug dealers.” “And then we find out, well, how is this happening? Well, all of us are paying to send them to schools that teach them how to be strippers and drug dealers,” he added without evidence. “We’re sending our kids to public schools where they’re learning how to hate God, they’re learning how to hate the country, they’re learning how to adopt a set of values that calls good evil and evil good, and boys can be girls and girls can be boys.”

Far-right has-been actor Kirk Cameron went on Elizabeth Johnston’s podcast this week to whine about public schools by insinuating that schools train kids to be “Marxists, little statists, little atheists, drag queens, strippers, drug dealers…”

From the 08.13.2024 edition of The Elizabeth Johnston Podcast:

[nellasbookplanet]

Finished another piece from the mighty nein coloring book just in time for the second reunion reveal, I cannot believe we'll soon get to see them all again!!

[studyblr-med]

summer mornings after finishing your exams >>>>>

[archivlibrarianist]

...but as it turns out, it's a scam, because she's connected with a children's book publishing company that is a rival to Scholastic.

From the article:

"On November 14, a 20-year-old woman named Lanah Burkhardt appeared before the school board of the Conroe Independent School District in Texas. Burkhardt told the board that, when she was 11, she read a Scholastic book that introduced her to 'a single kiss.' According to Burkhardt, her exposure to this Scholastic book was directly responsible for her developing a debilitating addiction to pornography. 

"...Burkhardt cited her story as a reason to restrict access to Drama, a novel published by Scholastic. The book includes this image of two people kissing: 

"But Burkhardt went further, arguing that Conroe should remove all Scholastic books from schools and stop hosting Scholastic book fairs. These steps were necessary, Burkhardt argued, to protect children from "sexual obscenity." According to Burkhardt, 'getting rid of Scholastic books and their book fairs will inevitably protect kids.' 

"Burkhardt's appearance was promoted by SkyTree Book Fairs, a newly formed organization marketing itself as 'an alternative to the sexually explicit content distributed in Scholastic's book fairs.'

"While SkyTree Book Fairs presents itself as an independent non-profit organization, it appears to be a hastily assembled offshoot of Brave Books, which publishes children's books by right-wing pundits and pseudo-celebrities. The link between SkyTree Book Fairs and Brave Books was first reported by Book Riot.

"Neither Brave Books nor Burkhardt disclosed that Burkhardt is an employee of Brave Books. According to her LinkedIn profile, Burkhardt is the company's 'public relations coordinator.'"

[yrsonpurpose]

ways of saying i love you, without saying i love you.

[wtffundiefamilies]

Please tell me this shit is satire. (I know it's not. Elizabeth Johnstone sure is...special.)

BRAVE Books and Elizabeth Johnston have partnered together to tackle the topic of Sanctity of Life in our story Little Lives Matter, which tells the story of Momma Bear and her beloved son Mobi. Mobi is born with only one front paw which makes motherhood and Mobi’s development even more difficult than it would have been. However, Momma Bear won’t give up on Mobi even when Culture the Vulture offers her an easier life. About the Brave Books was founded by conservative parents, who while trying to raise their children to love their God and country, became aware that there is a real war going on for the hearts and minds of the next generation. Unfortunately, it’s a one-sided battle. That’s why Brave Books created a conservative alternative to the current progressive agenda that dominates our culture. More About BRAVE We didn’t want to just create good books that children would enjoy and eventually forget, but instead we wanted to create a learning experience woven into an epic adventure that will forever live in your children's hearts and minds. This is why we have built the BRAVE Universe which is a world with both a fascinating map and cast of characters. Every month, BRAVE Books partners with a conservative figure to create a story that takes place in this world and teaches children either a topical or foundational conservative lesson.