Why are blue counties banning books?

It's all part of the scam

Welcome to a premium Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, it marked the culmination of one of America’s oldest traditions. From the moment that colonists began swindling land away from Native tribes, the United States has been a nation of scammers, crooks, and underhanded schemers, who often accidentally shaped history in their quest to make money off the public.

Allowing Trump — a serially bankrupt celebrity best known for cheating on his wives and stiffing his creditors — to take his conman show to the White House was the purest expression of America’s tolerance of charlatans. His temporary banishment has done nothing to diminish the zeal and efficacy of shady crooks.

The silver lining? We have the receipts, and we’ll discuss a few major recent revelations in tonight’s newsletter. We’ll also talk about the Democrats’ new reconciliation development and crucial points to consider.

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Phantom Reactionaries Seize Control

Bucks County, PA is a relatively well-to-do suburban community on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Politically moderate, the county finally flipped to Democrats during the 2018 wave, and then voted blue down the line in 2020. In short, it does not profile as the sort of place where you’d expect local officials to feel pressure to create a formal process for banning books, yet that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday.

The Central Bucks School District voted 6-3 to green-light a new policy that takes aim at what the school superintendent calls “gratuitous, salacious, over-the-top, unnecessary, sexualized content.” Residents will now have the opportunity to challenge books’ place in school libraries; how the process will work and which books can be pulled will be left to the school district’s superintendent, who supported the proposal.

So what happened? The answer is quite sinister.