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      Who profits from blood plasma donations in the US? Politics Weekly America podcast

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      Kathleen McLaughlin has a rare chronic illness and needs regular treatments using people’s blood plasma. She started researching the US blood plasma industry a decade ago and has written a book, Blood Money, about what it says about class, race and inequality.
      This week, she speaks to Joan E Greve about what she’s learned about the for-profit blood plasma industry
      • How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Book bans in US public schools increase by 28% in six months, Pen report finds

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      Book bans in US public schools increased by 28% in the first half of the 2022-23 academic year, the writers’ organisation Pen America said on Thursday, describing a “relentless” conservative “crusade to constrict children’s freedom to read”.Releasing a new report, Banned in the USA: State Laws Supercharge Book Suppression in Schools, Pen said the increase was over figures for the previous six months.“Censorious legislation in states across the country has been a driving force behind new restrictions on access to books in public schools,” it said.“Since Pen America started tracking public school book bans in July 2021, [it] has recorded more than 4,000 instances of banned books … this includes 1,477 individual book bans affecting 874 unique titles during the first half of the 2022-23 school year.”Book bans are more common in Republican-run states. According to Pen, “seven districts in Texas were responsible for 438 instances of individual book bans, and 13 districts in Florida were responsible for 357 bans”.It added: “Of the 1,477 books banned this school year, 30% are about race, racism or include characters of colour, while 26% have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.”Pen also highlighted “the misapplication of labels such as ‘pornographic’ or ‘indecent’ by activists and politicians to justify the removal of books that do not remotely fit the well-established legal and colloquial definitions of pornography.“Alarmist rhetoric about ‘porn in schools’ has been a significant factor behind such mischaracterisations, which routinely conflate books that contain any sexual content or include LGBTQ+ characters with ‘pornography’.”According to Pen, the most frequently banned books in the 2022-23 US school year were Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, Flamer by Mike Curato, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins and The Handmaid’s Tale: a Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood and Renée Nault.Atwood last year supported Pen by auctioning an “un-burnable” edition of her dystopian feminist novel, which was published in 1985 and became the inspiration for a hit TV series. It raised $130,000.Atwood said then: “Free speech issues are being hotly debated, and Pen is a sane voice [amid] all the shouting.”Book bans have not been without political blowback.In Florida on Wednesday, so-called “don’t say gay” laws regarding the teaching of gender and LGBTQ+ issues were expanded from public elementary schools to the whole state system. But the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, last week saw a major donor pause support for his nascent presidential run, citing book bans as one policy of concern.Interactive Brokers founder Thomas Peterffy told the Financial Times: “I have put myself on hold. Because of his stance on abortion and book banning … myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.”The Pen chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, said: “The heavy-handed tactics of state legislators are mandating book bans, plain and simple.“Some politicians like Ron DeSantis have tried to dismiss the rise in book bans as a ‘hoax’. But their constituents and supporters are not fooled. The numbers don’t lie, and reveal a relentless crusade to constrict children’s freedom to read.” More

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      Alexandra Petri’s US history review: if you’re going to lie, lie big – and funny

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      In the 18th century, sexting was much more difficult. It had to be conducted by letter, of course, resulting in long delays and messages arriving out of order – particularly if you were on opposite sides of the Atlantic, as John and Abigail Adams were in the late 1770s.Incredibly, we now have a record of their attempts to exchange lewd notes, published this month in Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up). The Washington Post humor columnist takes us on a tour of centuries of US history, including a first-hand look at the Adamses struggling to confirm how many petticoats and long shirts have been removed at any point in a year-and-a-half-long correspondence, interrupted by concerns over the health of their cows and a particularly lascivious note from Benjamin Franklin.It’s one of dozens of very funny essays stretching from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas to the presidency of Donald Trump. At a time when many elected officials are seeking to rewrite history to make America look better, “why stop at saying slavery was not so bad or Andrew Jackson was a swell guy? Why not actually commit to the principle of the thing and insert all the bizarre documents that you think ought to be there?” Petri writes.“If you’re going to lie about the past, lie big!”Petri works in a huge variety of formats: letters, poetry, scripts, maps. Important early documents include a European’s guide to naming places: (Options: “name of king but put town on the end”, “New [place you just left]”, “your ethnic group, plural, but put ‘boro’ on the end”); a guide to toys for Puritan parents (“There is nothing silly about this putty. It is plain, functional putty that can be used to imprint passages of scripture”); and a more realistic take on the minutemen, titled The Hour Men, because what if you need snacks or misplace your musket?Later we witness the author and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton trapped in a romcom while planning the landmark Seneca Falls convention, “because whenever a work-oriented woman goes to a small town for any reason, the town tries to seize her and put her in a Hallmark romance”. Stanton knows she “really ought to work on the Declaration of Sentiments,” Petri writes. “But for the first time in her life, she was feeling sentiments rather than just declaring them.”There’s a record of what civil war photographers said to posing troops: “Say: ‘Everyone I love will soon be dead!’ But don’t say it with your mouth, say it with your eyes.’” And there are plenty of literary parodies, including musing on what Edgar Allan Poe’s work would have been like had he just had a good handyman – maybe that telltale heart could have been removed and the House of Usher could have remained standing – and a rewriting of Fahrenheit 451 that dares to ask how, if books are banned, there are still enough being printed for book-burners to have a full-time job.More recent documents include a record of what Nancy Reagan’s psychic began predicting after she realized her words were affecting policy: “A romantic partner continues to be receptive to your influence. Consider urging him to do something about the Aids crisis.”Visual elements feature a blend of Thoreau and a perennially missing man, in the form of “Where’s Walden?”, and a PowerPoint presentation by Nikola Tesla’s friends, concerned that the physicist is in love with a pigeon (which is something he actually admitted to, one of several genuine pieces of history I learned from this book).Petri’s writing is consistently witty and erudite without the slightest hint of pretentiousness, and her tone is generally jovial and upbeat. Most of the book will be accessible to anyone who paid attention in high school history class, though there are a few essays with prerequisites: a spoof of the writer Shirley Jackson, for instance, went over my head despite a dim memory that I was forced to read The Lottery somewhere along the line. As is generally the case with parody, the better you know the original, the funnier it will be.“If you’re going to lie, lie big.” But Petri’s lies spring from vast knowledge of the facts of US history. If you can make the 19th-century debate over monetary policy funny, you’re clearly on to something.
      Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents I Made Up is published in the US by WW Norton More

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      A Fever in the Heartland review: chilling tale of the Klan and a dangerous leader

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      Hubris can be difficult to resist, no matter how well one appreciates the danger. Foremost, in his new book A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them”, Timothy Egan indicates just how self-destructive hubris can be.It led to the downfall of David C Stephenson, a sadistic, grifting, backstabbing, vengeful, womanizing grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the center of Egan’s story of extremism and white rage, a tale with many parallels to our own time. Similar overconfidence might yet bring down Donald J Trump. For sure, reading Egan’s gripping book, my own hubris nearly waylaid me.At first, it seemed no writer could possibly offer anything different from what had already been compellingly presented on TV. In 1989, I was among rapt multitudes introduced by the miniseries Cross of Fire to this lurid tale from the second rise of the Klan.The KKK was born at the close of the civil war, in resentment of burgeoning African American independence. By the 1890s it was fading, with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, but the first world war “birthed” a more virulent second coming. Determined to keep Black people in their place, klansmen were also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Native American, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-abortion and anti-communist.Cross of Fire, made 70 years later, concerned a rape and murder. Madge Oberholtzer was a 28-year-old educator, unmarried and living with her parents. Stephenson, her assailant, led the Indiana branch of the Klan. Armed with a private force, 30,000-strong, wielding graft and bribes, he reigned supreme, the governor and many other officials firmly under his thumb. When he was brought to trial, he was in no doubt he would get off.Cross of Fire was shown in two segments, two hours each, and reached about 20 million viewers. Back then, I think, a certain optimism was still alive in America. With most social struggles behind us, it was broadly imagined, we were well on the way to rectifying our worst problems. In that context, a televised account of the Klan’s insidious rise across 1920s America seemed almost hard to believe.But the truth is chilling. At one point, the Klan reached millions of white Americans. Feeling threatened by newly enfranchised women, growing numbers of immigrants and African Americans made restive by commendable war service, many such white men felt certain they had been robbed of the position their fathers and grandfathers knew. Stevenson was a crusading would-be strong man. If not plain-spoken, he was at least an ignorant man’s idea of a wise one. Seemingly amiable, seemingly much like those who followed him, to some he felt like an answered prayer.If this is starting to sound familiar, back in 1989 it seemed outrageously implausible. Weren’t the 1920s the Roaring Twenties, the rebellious, modernizing Jazz Age? Was it not an era of prosperity and wellbeing? The problem is a matter of nuance. Setbacks or backlash attendant to progress are seldom acknowledged with the same emphasis as advancement. That’s why it is imperative to teach all American history, good or bad.The idea of making America great again is an old one, rooted in a nativist embrace of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant supremacy. A hundred years ago, many were throughly taken in by nationalist rhetoric and circus-like spectacle.Stephenson had no education beyond high school. He was an ardent fan of Mussolini. He claimed he had studied psychology and knew how to play on people’s emotions. Klan rallies whipped up followers, as frenzied as any at Nuremberg, into ecstatic orgies of cheering. Some called beseechingly for Stephenson to become president. In the flickering light of flaming crosses, large banners insisted: “America is for Americans.” It all planted a seed in a man convinced that everything – and anyone – could be bought.In his book, Egan explains how, much as with African Americans and the Black church, to many whites, Klan membership “gave meaning, shape and purpose to the days”.From neo-Confederates to hardline Brexiters, how perplexing is the malfeasance, the villainy, the rank hypocrisy of those who preach law and order and freedom and justice the loudest? It all brings to mind Churchill’s observation about Stalin and Russia after the pact with Hitler in 1939: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”Undaunted, Egan examines and sorts out the complexities and contradictions of the rise of Stephenson and the Klan. In doing so, unlike a writer for TV, he has no need for dramatic license.In Cross of Fire, Oberholtzer marries Stephenson – or so she thinks. It turns out the officiant is a henchman. This detail is important. It sets into motion a supposed honeymoon, a joyride on a private railway car to Chicago, a wedding trip that facilitates Stephenson’s crime.Dealing in fact, Egan reveals that not even a pretend wedding took place. Oberholtzer believed Stephenson could keep her state job from being cut but she never trusted him to the extent of getting married. She was drugged and taken by force.On her deathbed, she summoned the will to give an account of her ordeal. A transcript was presented in court. So was a doctor’s testimony. As much as the poison Oberholtzer ingested, the doctor said, sepsis, from deep bites on her face, breasts, tongue and elsewhere, resulted in Oberholtzer’s death. With timely attention, her life might have been saved.Another fact absent from Cross of Fire but featured in Egan’s account is yet more disturbing. Stephenson was found guilty of Oberholtzer’s murder and sentenced to life, but he was never chastened. He broke parole and was re-imprisoned but he ultimately died a natural death, in 1966, aged 74. He tricked, cheated, married and sexually assaulted many times more. It is this learning of the limits of the wages of sin that distinguishes A Fever in the Heartland as an honest look at what really happened.
      A Fever in the Heartland is published in the US by Viking More

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      The Guardian view on US book bans: time to fight back | Editorial

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      “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door,” warns a character in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of an America where books are considered so dangerous they must be incinerated. The novel appeared 70 years ago, in the aftermath of Nazi book burnings and amid McCarthyism and Soviet ideological repression. But the urge to ban books has resurged with a vengeance, with the American Library Association (ALA) recording a doubling of censorship attempts in 2022, to 1,269 across 32 states: the highest rate for decades. Pen America, which champions freedom of expression, tallied more than 2,500 cases in the last school year.These attempts are not merely more numerous but are also broadening and deepening. The decisions of school boards and districts take place in the context of politicians grasping electoral advantage and punitive yet often vaguely worded state laws on education – such as the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis’s, Stop-Woke Act. At least 10 states have passed legislation increasing parental power over library stock, or limiting students’ access. In place of spontaneous challenges to single titles come challenges to multiple titles, organised by campaign groups such as Moms for Liberty. The ALA says that 40% of attempts last year targeted 100 books or more.Not only schools but now community libraries too are under scrutiny. The efforts are also increasingly punitive. Missouri Republicans this week voted to defund all of the state’s public libraries after librarians challenged a bill that has removed more than 300 books and that threatens educators “providing sexually explicit material” with imprisonment or a fine of up to $2,000. A library in Michigan was defunded last year; another in Texas is under threat this week.These challenges are overwhelmingly from the right. And while liberal parents have sought to remove titles such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from mandatory reading lists over their approach to race, this time the demand from parents is not merely that their child should not have to read particular titles – but that no one’s child should be able to unless they buy it privately.Pen America notes: “It is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history.” They include works by celebrated children’s writers such as Judy Blume, literary greats including Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood – and even the comic picture book I Need a New Butt. Librarians are attacked as “paedophiles” over sex education titles or those depicting same-sex relationships. In part, this is a backlash against efforts to diversify reading matter in schools and libraries. The pandemic also gave parents greater insight into what their children are studying and fostered a “parental rights” movement rooted in opposition to mask mandates.The primary cost is to children denied appropriately selected books that could be life-affirming and life-changing – even, perhaps, life-saving. The chilling effect of challenges makes librarians and teachers second-guess their choices and cut book purchases. In two Florida counties, officials this year ordered teachers to cover up or remove classroom libraries entirely, pending a review of the texts – reportedly leaving weeping children begging: “Please don’t take my books.” But parents, librarians and communities are waking up to the threat, and are organising and educating to counter it. Books are the building blocks of civilisation. They must be defended.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Nine Black Robes review: how Trump turned the supreme court right

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      Joan Biskupic is senior supreme court analyst at CNN, a Pulitzer finalist and an established biographer. In her latest book, she seeks to make sense of the court during and after the presidency of Donald J Trump, culminating last June when five conservative justices overturned Roe v Wade, the ruling which guaranteed access to abortion. In one swoop, the court gutted the rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.It was more important for the favourites of the Federalist Society to be “right” than smart. As we saw this week, Wisconsin Democrats say thank you.On the US supreme court, the majority in Dobbs v Jackson, the abortion ruling, said personal autonomy lacked constitutional safeguards unless explicitly enumerated in the text of the document. Precedents protecting the right to contraception, interracial marriage, same-sex relations and marriage now stand on shaky ground.“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell,” Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, referring to the rulings on contraception, same-sex relations and marriage.Thomas did not mention Loving v Virginia, which guaranteed the right to interracial marriage. He is Black. His wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas, is white.Biskupic knows the history of the court. In earlier biographies, she studied the chief justice, John Roberts, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor, the retired Sandra Day O’Connor and the late Antonin Scalia.As expected, Nine Black Robes is well researched. Biskupic plumbs the papers of the late William Brennan, a liberal appointed by Dwight D Eisenhower in 1956. But her book also contains more than its fair share of chambers chatter.Biskupic captures the unease of some court members at being used as props by Trump. They felt “tricked”. Trump assured them a party for Brett Kavanaugh, his second nominee, would not turn overtly political. It did.“Some justices told me later that they were sorry they had gone,” Biskupic writes.Among the “stone faced” justices at the White House, Thomas was “conspicuously enthusiastic, alone applaud[ing] heartily after Kavanaugh spoke”. Later, Thomas’s wife would seek to help Trump overturn an election.Biskupic also recounts tensions between Roberts and Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first conservative pick for the court. Gorsuch did not attend his first scheduled justices-only meeting. Roberts’s entreaties meant little.According to Biskupic, Gorsuch penned dissents and chivvied other justices. For example, in Torres v Madrid, a police abuse case, he “suggested his colleagues were kowtowing to policing concerns and the Black Lives Matter movement”.In his dissent, Gorsuch asked: “If efficiency cannot explain today’s decision, what’s left? Maybe it is an impulse that individuals like Ms Torres should be able to sue for damages. Sometimes police shootings are justified, but other times they cry out for a remedy.”Gorsuch also accused the majority of a “schizophrenic reading of the word ‘seizure’”. The chief justice was not amused.“The dissent speculates that the real reason for today’s decision is an ‘impulse’ to provide relief to Torres,” Roberts noted. “There is no call for such surmise.”Comity and appearances do not weigh heavily on Gorsuch. As Biskupic notes, his mother, Ann Gorsuch Burford, was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan but was found in contempt of Congress, a first for an agency head. She resigned, feeling used.After less than a year on the court, Gorsuch spoke at the Trump International hotel in Washington, addressing a “Defending Freedom Luncheon” sponsored by the Fund for American Studies, a conservative group. As Biskupic notes, the hotel then stood “embroiled in litigation about unconstitutional financial benefit for the president who appointed him”.Gorsuch’s appearance may have been an act of contrition, designed to placate Trump’s wrath. Months earlier, Gorsuch reportedly conveyed criticism of the president to Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, during a courtesy call. Trump’s attacks on the judiciary were too much even for Gorsuch.But he is not the only justice with limited bandwidth for playing nice. Biskupic “learned” that Sotomayor circulated “a blistering draft dissent” which caused colleagues to back off from barring racially conscious preferences in college admissions. Now, Sotomayor’s luck may be running out. In challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the court is expected to strike down race-based admissions.Two years ago, Sotomayor attacked Kavanaugh’s legal reasoning in a case that involved a juvenile life sentence without parole.“The court is fooling no one,” she thundered, in Jones v Mississippi. “The court’s misreading is egregious enough on its own … The court twists precedent even further.”Biskupic also considers Trump’s legal woes, reporting on deliberations surrounding a ruling in favor of Cy Vance Jr, then Manhattan district attorney, in June 2020. The court upheld a subpoena demanding eight years of Trump’s tax returns. Voting 7-2, the court rejected Trump’s contention that he was immune from investigation simply because he was president. A little more than two years later, Trump stands indicted in the same jurisdiction.“We cannot conclude that absolute immunity is necessary or appropriate under article II or the supremacy clause,” Roberts wrote in 2020. “No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.”But the margin of the decision was not preordained.Biskupic writes: “In their private telephonic conference, the Trump v Vance case produced a 5-4 split, I later learned, to affirm the lower-court judgment against Trump.”Roberts’s cajoling made a difference.“Over the course of two months he coaxed and compromised,” Biskupic writes. “Only Thomas and Alito declined to sign on.”Nowadays, Biskupic laments, “the court has no middle, no center to hold.“… Donald Trump, who had demonstrated so little respect for the law, truth and democracy, changed the balance for at least a generation.”
      Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      Unlikely Heroes review: the advisers who helped FDR shape America

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      No modern American political era has been the subject of more books than the 12 years in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. But Derek Leebaert’s personality-driven account of the life and times of our greatest president quickly convinces us there is a place for one more compelling volume.Leebaert’s formal focus is on the four people many agree were the most important deputies to FDR:
      Harry Hopkins, the “son of an itinerant harness maker from Iowa” who became the president’s number one adviser and as secretary of commerce the nation’s “largest employer”, as the New Deal fought to end the massive unemployment of the Great Depression.
      Harold Ickes, who Roosevelt “appointed out of nowhere” to be secretary of the interior, an early advocate for African Americans and Native Americans, the “first American official to be denounced by Hitler” and a “formidable war administrator” who became central to the allies’ victory in the second world war.
      Frances Perkins, secretary of labor and the first woman in the US cabinet, who made the creation of social security a condition of her employment during her job interview on the second floor of Roosevelt’s house on East 65th Street in Manhattan.
      Henry Wallace, the “foremost agronomist” in the western hemisphere who was secretary of agriculture and whose fabled intellectual strength was eventually matched by an extreme naivety about the failings of Joseph Stalin.
      Leebaert’s admirable strategy is to tell us as much about the personal struggles of these four giants as he does about their extraordinary achievements in the greatest administration of all. Part of his thesis is that they were so successful because their boss was as good at exploiting their weaknesses as he was at cultivating their strengths.Leebaert is also masterful at making his history relevant by reminding us of similarities between the challenges Roosevelt faced and issues that bedevil us today.It was during the re-election campaign in 1936 that FDR first talked about how a “concentration of wealth” had generated an “inequality of opportunity”. His more enlightened contemporaries were shocked that chief executive salaries of $100,000 towered over “the $1,200 that barely half of all families could hope for”.Leebaert immediately reminds us how much worse that problem has become in our time, when a “CEO’s job comes at a ratio of 320 to 1 for a worker’s”.There are many other echoes of our own time. We learn about Perkins’ foresight in trying to convince a young New York company, IBM, to invent a way of keeping track of state unemployment records. We are reminded that the original promoters of the America First slogan were the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, a publisher whose greediness and contempt for democracy have been perfectly replicated by Rupert Murdoch.Ickes’ personal struggles provide some of the book’s liveliest passages. First we learn that his “long wretched marriage to a rich divorcée only turned worse after he seduced his stepdaughter”. Almost as soon as he moved into his new office as secretary of the interior, Ickes began an affair with one Marguerite Moser. He dispatched Moser’s fiance to a job in the midwest, then hired his mistress at his own office as well as her female roommate. When the fiance complained that he wanted to come back to Washington, he got a job at headquarters as well.When Ickes started receiving blackmail letters about his affair, at the advice of a White House aide he used “the cruder methods of thuggish interior department investigators”. They persuaded a property manager to open the apartment of the jealous fiance, from which “carbon paper and an incriminating typewriter were removed”. The letters stopped and the fiance lost his government job – but eventually did marry Ickes’ mistress.Ickes’ defiance of convention had much more beneficial effects, as when he began his tenure by ending the segregation of Black and white employees at his department, then hired Black architects and engineers to work on some of thousands of New Deal public works projects.The scope of such efforts is suggested by the fact that in two days, Ickes authorized two of the biggest New York City transportation initiatives: the Lincoln tunnel under the Hudson river, connecting Manhattan and New Jersey, and the Triborough bridge that links three Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis was truly the era when the government worked for its citizens. The Works Progress Administration would eventually employ 9 million Americans over eight years. Between 1933 and 1940, “federal spending would double as tax revenue tripled, which included a Wealth Tax Act in 1935, which raised the top federal rate to 75%”.Also in 1935, the president signed into law his labor secretary’s signature project, the Social Security Act. The year before that, Ickes shepherded the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which ended 50 years of forced assimilation of Native Americans.The struggle to get the US into the second world war is covered with equal thoroughness in the second half of the book, including Ickes’ vital role as one of the first to identify the mortal danger posed by Hitler.Leebaert has written a panoramic history of one of the most successful eras of the US. By the end of his 432 pages, the author has made a convincing case that Roosevelt’s “fractious team of four” may well have been “the single most important to ever have shaped their country’s history”.
      Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      Democrats bid to use censorship law against DeSantis and ban his book

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      Democrats in Florida are attempting to use a state law that censors books in public schools against the governor who signed it, Ron DeSantis, by asking schools to review or ban the Republican governor’s own book, The Courage to be Free.“The very trap he set for others is the one that he set for himself,” Fentrice Driskell, the Democratic minority leader in the Florida state house, told the Daily Beast.DeSantis published The Courage to be Free in February, in what was widely seen as an opening shot in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He has said he wrote the book himself.Seeking to compete with Donald Trump – who enjoys convincing leads in polling – DeSantis has established himself as a ruthless culture warrior, willing to use government power against opposing interests and viewpoints.He signed the law regarding books in schools last year. It includes guidelines for content deemed inappropriate on grounds of race, sexuality, gender and depictions of violence.But the law has run into problems over interpretations of its language, not least when a children’s book about Roberto Clemente, a baseball legend who faced racial discrimination, landed at the centre of national controversy.Seeking to take advantage of such uncertainties, Florida Democrats are highlighting instances of language in DeSantis’s book which they contend could violate his own guidelines.As reported by the Beast, in The Courage to be Free, DeSantis “use[s] the terms ‘woke’ and ‘gender ideology’ 46 times and 10 times respectively, both of which could constitute ‘divisive concepts’ the governor has argued should stay out of curricula up to the college level”.DeSantis also claims students have been forced to “chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice” and, as well as describing violence at Black Lives Matter protests, cites a video showing “dead black children, dramatically warning … about ‘racist police and state-sanctioned violence’”.DeSantis also describes the 2017 mass shooting at congressional baseball practice in which Steve Scalise, a senior Republican, was seriously wounded.Such passages, Democrats contend (in what the Florida publisher Peter Schorsch called a “clever bit of trolling”), could fall foul of the governor’s own rules.According to the Beast, only one school district initially responded to Democrats’ complaints. Marion county, near Orlando, said no public school there possessed the governor’s book.Driskell told the Beast: “We’re leaning into one of [DeSantis’s] weaknesses.“… If America doesn’t want Florida’s present reality to become America’s future reality, people need to know what it’s like here. This is our way of fighting back, but also highlighting how ridiculous some of this becomes, right?” More