South Carolina to Launch Biggest Censorship Campaign Yet

South Carolina is expected to implement one of the most restrictive state-wide public school books bans in the country Tuesday—and it has a close ally of Moms for Liberty to blame.

The draconian new law will require all instructional materials, including library books, to be considered “Age or Developmentally Appropriate.” If that term sounds purposefully meaningless, that’s because it is. The new rule vaguely defines appropriate “topics, messages, and teaching methods” as being “suitable to particular ages or age groups of children and adolescents, based on developing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral capacity typical for the age or age group.”

This definition, which leaves plenty of room for its expansive application, comes with an additional caveat that will make possible the most restrictive ban on books in the nation.

Instructional material will no longer be considered “age or developmentally appropriate” if it includes descriptions or visual depictions of “sexual conduct.” South Carolina state law defines sexual conduct as “vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse, whether actual or simulated, normal or perverted, whether between human beings, animals, or a combination thereof.”

This change is a significant tightening of the law, which previously required descriptions of sexual conduct to be considered “obscene” in order for them to qualify a book for removal from a public school library. For sexual conduct to be considered obscene, it needed to appeal to a “prurient interest in sex,” lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” be patently offensive, or fail to meet community standards, according to state law.

South Carolina’s absurdly authoritarian rule will automatically go into effect on June 25, and will be even more restrictive than Governor Ron Desantis’s crackdown on books in Florida, which also uses the obscenity rule. The South Carolina law will undoubtedly have an outsize effect on all materials related to LGBTQ+ people and experiences, but it will also apply to classic works of literature such as Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet, and The Odyssey.

The new law is the brainchild of State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, who was invited to speak at a summit in Philadelphia last summer for the extremist parental rights group Moms for Liberty.

Earlier this month, South Carolina’s Department of Education decided to drop Advanced Placement African American studies courses from schools and remove college credit for those classes. In April, Weaver advised schools to ignore President Joe Biden’s updated Title IX rules, which expanded protections for LGBTQ+ students.

This new rule, which was approved in November, represents a significant escalation for the totalitarian bureaucrat who aims to create a society that relies on state censorship, fueling ignorance in the hope of creating a new generation of bigoted Americans.

Eric Trump really wants to praise his father, Donald Trump, and on a podcast episode over the weekend, his flattery went over the top.

Speaking on the X22 Report, which has been banned from YouTube and other social media sites for promoting QAnon conspiracies, Trump said his father’s greatest accomplishment is his “unvarnished honesty.”

“I think my father will go down, maybe his greatest accomplishment will actually be kind of the unvarnished honesty that he’s really taken toward the whole system,” the younger Trump said.

And he was immediately taken to task.

Donald Trump’s lying is well established, with many sites tracking his extensive falsehoods for years. About 76 percent of the 1,000 fact checks Politifact has conducted on him came back false, and The Washington Post found 30,573 false or misleading claims during the four years of his presidency. In a speech in Wisconsin last week, Trump made at least 30 false statements alone. In Trumpworld, though, honesty just seems to be attacking the people that Trump supporters hate.

Former White House chief strategist and current podcast host Steve Bannon is set to report to prison to serve a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena related to his participation in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Before he does, though, the MAGA luminary laid down a ground rule for Trump’s 2024 campaign.

“We’re the railhead of the big steal every day, with every aspect of it, and we take pride in it. I’m adamant. There shouldn’t be anybody in the Trump campaign or the RNC in a paid position that does not believe to the marrow of their bones that the 2020 election was stolen. If you don’t believe that, to me, you miss the point of where we are and why we’re here,” Bannon said in a new interview published in The Guardian.

One person who might not pass Bannon’s vetting test: former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who was caught on tape during an interview with Variety editor Ramin Setoodeh accidentally admitting that he lost the election. One imagines the big man would be given a pass, but still it’s clear that Republicans are seeking an ideological purge of all but the truest of believers in the baseless idea that Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.

Bannon also claimed that Fox News, which settled a defamation lawsuit brought by voting machine company Dominion for $787.5 million and faces a separate $2.7 million defamation suit from Smartmatic for broadcasting false information about the companies in the aftermath of the 2020 election, was engaging in a “psyop” for ceasing coverage of the stolen election myth.

And for good measure, Bannon refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, retreating into the same evasions, semantic games, and packaged phrases of supposed contingencies that Trump (and the rest of the conservative movement) made popular in 2020 and promises to trot out again. “We’re going to have to go through it line by line and make sure. It’s got to be certifiable, chain of custody, legitimate votes from American citizens. If we do that and those votes are there I have no problem if they win, but we’re not going to answer now ‘Yes, we’re going to do it’, because we don’t know, we’re not there yet and it’s going to be hard fought. Nobody’s asked Democrats that if Trump wins,” he said.

The Supreme Court has picked up another LGBTQ rights case–and despite the court’s recent hard-rightward swing, it could go either way.

The case, United States v. Skrmetti, will argue whether a law out of Tennessee barring gender-affirming medical procedures for minors violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The challengers to the draconian law are three teenagers, aged between 13 and 16 years old, who have received puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

The teens—and several major U.S. medical groups—argue that gender-affirming care is lifesaving care, drastically reducing the rates of depression, anxiety, and reported suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary kids.

“The future of countless transgender youth in this and future generations rests on this Court adhering to the facts, the Constitution, and its own modern precedent,” said Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, in a press release, decrying the bill as an “openly political effort to wage war” on individual freedoms.

Although Republicans have latched onto the transgender community as a focus of their cruel attacks in recent years, it is unclear if the conservative majority on the nation’s highest court will rule against access. In 2020, in a major win for the LGBTQ community, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the then-four liberal justices in determining that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian, and transgender people from workplace discrimination based on their sexual or gender orientation.

Writing the majority opinion, Gorsuch commented that “the answer is clear.”

Lawyers for plaintiffs could similarly argue that refusing to provide gender-affirming care is discrimination based on someone’s gender. But if they are unsuccessful, then children nationwide will be left without medical care—and it will likely open the door to ban gender-affirming care for adults next.

The justices will hear arguments in United States v. Skrmetti in the fall, with an opinion expected by late June 2025.

As plans for a second, “better” (read: more competent in its authoritarianism) Trump administration take shape six months out from the 2024 election, a frightening new initiative appears to be part of it: the creation of a blacklist of federal workers whom conservatives worry might attempt to block the implementation of Trump policies.

Project Sovereignty 2025, a McCarthyite plan to identify and make public names of governmental employees serving as bulwarks against unconstitutional border and deportation policies, is the creation of former Republican congressional aide Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation, an AP report revealed. Jones won a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation to create the blacklist. According to the AP, Jones’s work is based largely on “gut check[s]” and “instinct,” running roughshod over the lives of federal workers to ensure the easy implementation of conservative policies should Trump win in November.

The dystopian measure appears to be the newest scheme of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda. The blacklist is an outgrowth of the agenda, outlined in a 900-page document, to stock the federal government with ideologically sympathetic civil servants willing to shirk their duties to expedite ultraconservative orders. Key to Project 2025 is the proposed revival of Trump’s Schedule F executive order, a provision that reclassifies civil servants as political appointees, making them easier to fire. Jones’s list of enemies would be used to target workers for removal from the government under Schedule F, which the Biden administration repealed.

The conservative attempt to weaponize the civil service is alarming, if predictable. It follows from a first Trump term that saw constant turnover in leadership, often over perceived disloyalty to the president, and efforts to gum up the works of the administration by resisting civil servants. That the conservative movement is building an infrastructure to circumvent those civil servants who stood up in the face of the Trump administration’s most egregious overreaches should concern those who, resisting invocations of the “fascist” label, insist that despite his fascistic rhetoric, Trump essentially governed as a standard conservative during his time in office. With the weight of legacy conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation and their open witch-hunting cadres like the American Accountability Foundation, a second Trump administration would be even more disastrous for the rule of law than the first.