A cop’s decision to sport a body camera and search a Massachusetts middle school for a book has raised serious concerns among civil liberties experts, a new report shows.
The Berkshire Eagle reported Wednesday on mounting fears after the Great Barrington plainclothes police officer who entered an eighth grade classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.
“Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia," Ruth A. Bourquin, senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told the local news outlet. "What are we doing?”
For their part, police say they were obligated to investigate a complaint about the book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, a memoir about gender identity that contains sexually explicit illustrations and language, the report notes.
The US has been a “post truth” nation a lot longer than many people realize. Easily disproven falsehoods like this have been a part of its culture for decades. I think it’s gaining so much attention now because it’s just getting beyond ridiculous.
Almost as if two entire generations of propaganda during the Cold War was enough to sway the collective consciousness. It doesn’t matter if the WW2 vets or GenZ/Alpha believe it, because they’re not the ones in charge right now. There were two (three, if you count the early millennials) entire generations of people who were raised in and around anti-communist propaganda.
That’s not something the populace will be able to shake off in a few years. That’s the kind of shit that takes literal generations to settle down, because GenX/millennials will need to be the crazy dementia-ridden great grandparents ranting about communists in the soap dispenser before GenZ/Alpha will be able to look at them with pity and go “yeah, okay grandpa. Go back to your Seinfeld reruns and we’ll take care of that for you.”