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The story was ridiculous enough on the surface: A 20-year-old woman showed up at a Texas school board meeting and insisted that a kiss depicted in a specific children’s book had set her on the path to a pornography addiction that left her depressed and suicidal within two years, at age 13. At the meeting at which she testified, the Conroe Independent School District voted to restrict access to another book, “Drama,” for students in the eighth grade and below despite it having no content more sexually explicit than a staged kiss. It’s a book for grade-school kids that has now been restricted to high school students. What “Drama” does have, though, is LGBTQ+ characters.
This is some ridiculous bigoted book-banning nonsense worthy of attention. But Substacker Frank Strong and Popular Information’s Judd Legum dug deeper and discovered that this was in effect a performance put on by a would-be right-wing competitor to Scholastic, the children’s book giant that published “Drama” and dominates the school book fair world.
Lanah Burkhardt is the woman who claimed that the “single kiss” she encountered in a book when she was 11 years old made her a depressed, suicidal porn addict at 13. “I don’t want Conroe ISD students to repeat what I went through because they accidentally ran upon a Scholastic book or another book that could lead them down this road,” she said, “which Drama is one of them.”
I’m going to submit that if an 11-year-old becomes a tormented pornography addict, there may be factors at play other than a single kiss in a single book. So many 11-year-olds, in fact, read books with kisses in them without becoming addicted to pornography that Occam’s razor says that if that does happen to one 11-year-old, it is probably a sign that she needs some pretty serious help. However, I’m also going to submit that Burkhardt was probably misrepresenting her story in significant ways.
But Burkhardt wasn’t just some tormented soul who wandered into a school board meeting to tell her completely true story. She is, according to her LinkedIn profile, an employee of Brave Books. Brave Books is a far-right publisher attempting to set itself up as competition to Scholastic for school book fairs. Burkhardt wasn’t the only Brave Books representative who spoke at the meeting; the company’s CEO, Trent Talbot, at least admitted his affiliation. Burkhardt didn’t. She called on the board to remove all Scholastic books from the schools without admitting that she worked for a would-be competitor.
There was another public commenter at that school board meeting who didn’t fully disclose her affiliations. The president of SkyTree Book Fairs, Riley Lee, also spoke up for censorship. She did say she was with SkyTree, but, Legum writes, although that company “presents itself as an independent non-profit organization, it appears to be a hastily assembled offshoot of Brave Books.” Lee worked at Brave Books until earlier this year. An anti-Scholastic URL that previously took you to a Brave Books book fairs page now takes you to SkyTree Book Fairs. Book Riot recently detailed the connections between the two supposedly independent operations—and explained why their current structure could benefit them:
Where Brave Books is a money-making publisher, SkyTree Book Fairs has been incorporated not just as a separate entity, but as a 501c3 not-for-profit organization. Indeed, “fundraising” to host these book fairs across the country is essential to SkyTree’s non-profit model, so it makes sense they’d spin off their book fair arm from the publishing arm. It likely helps to have a little distance from Brave Books itself, given how those who can make decisions about the books accessible in schools and libraries are good at Googling and know how much Brave Books respect their institutions and professionals.
So we’ve got a right-wing publisher of books by has-been celebrities like Kirk Cameron and Kevin Sorbo and Republican politicians like Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, which has spun off a nonprofit book fair company that sells an awful lot of the publisher’s books and is run by a former employee of the publisher. They’re not admitting the connection. And when they show up at a school board meeting to argue in favor of ridiculous levels of censorship and bigotry, one of the publisher’s employees is there, no doubt coincidentally, not disclosing where she works and telling a highly dubious story about how a Scholastic book damaged her life.
It doesn’t sound like Brave Books or SkyTree Book Fairs can claim to be teaching the value of honesty.
But it worked. The Conroe ISD went ahead and restricted yet another book in a district where at least 125 books have already been removed. What’s more, a member of the board’s conservative majority suggested that it should look into replacing Scholastic book fairs with SkyTree ones. That hasn’t happened yet, but it sounds like it’s on the agenda. This isn’t some tiny little irrelevant school district, either: Conroe ISD is the 60th-largest school district in the United States, with 72,000 students. We’re already at the point where books are being restricted simply for having LGBTQ+ characters in them, and the book-banners are still escalating.
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