‘There is more than one way to burn a book, and the world is full of people running around with lit matches,’ Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, once wrote. And now, the far-left is proving that futuristic book burning — using methods without flames — is here. In this clip, Glenn reveals the most recent ways the left is censoring past, written works — from James Bond novels and Road Dahl classics to Dr. Seuss stories. Plus, he reads Bradbury’s warning for future generations and asks an important question: ‘What are we DOING gang?!’
Transcript
Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: I want to give you a couple of -- a couple of stories here, that I find really interesting. First of all, the American Federation of Teachers is promoting life brand. Now, I want you to really think about this. This is the American Federation of Teachers.
Randi Weingarten put out a tweet. Our union is here for you, to help you future proof your social media.
Now, think of that. Future proof your social media. ATF union has partnered with life brand, for a 20 percent -- 25 percent discount off the cost of this powerful tool. That scans your social media, to catch forgotten posts, that may not reflect who you are today.
What this post does, she says, as she linked to a page, on -- on the union's website.
Life brand scans your social media. Currently covers Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. To quickly find potentially harmful posts. And then guides you to edit or athlete those posts forever. Exclamation point.
The system scans texts, emojis. Video. And sound in both English and Spanish.
She said, in the course of 15 years, I know I have changed, and so has my social media presence. It was a great opportunity to take a stroll down memory lane. While I found some things that gave me pause. In the end, I believe my social media history reflects who I was then. And who I am today.
It was good to know, that if I found something, that others might use for negative purposes. I could delete it with one keystroke. I want you to carefully think about this.
This is the head of one of the most powerful unions in the country. A union that is currently, I believe, responsible mainly for the corruption of our children. Randi Weingarten is deep in bed, with a public/private partnership with this government. And she is now telling the teachers, you need to remove anything that might be a problem in the future.
Now, remember, many of these teachers are the teachers that we are now finding out are having sex with our students. They are corrupting our students.
So what is it that might be a problem? Well, she's saying, don't worry. You can future-proof yourself.
By the way, Mike Pompeo calls Weingarten, the most dangerous individual on earth.
He said, it's not even a close call.
If you ask who is most likely to take this republic down, it would be the teacher's unions. And the filth that they are teaching our kids.
And the fact that our kids don't know math and reading and writing. She is now instructing her followers how to launder their past.
Interesting. Now, the next story. Best-selling author Agatha Christie's books have been reportedly the latest target of sensitivity readers reworking and removing original passages in the new editions of her mysteries.
The novels written between 1920, 1976 are being stripped of certain language and descriptions that have been deemed offensive. And dialogue by unsympathetic characters, has been cut out.
Now, Agatha Christie died in 1976. So she's not making this call.
The James Bond franchise, TIME Magazine reports will receive a sensitivity review. Of James Bond?
Then that would mean that the novels would be about four pages. Of the 14 novels written from 1953, to 1956, the review will see some racially insensitive language and outdated stereotypes removed from the books by Ian Fleming. The author died, the year I was born in 1964.
British author Raul Dall, passed away in 1990. His Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and BFG, have been revised and edited by an organization called Inclusive Minds.
You know, in 1984, two plus two equals five. Right?
And slavery is freedom. And war is peace. Those are quotes from 1984. Are we not there?
A woman is a man. And a man can become pregnant. A Hispanic -- this one was in the news today.
A Hispanic can be a white supremacist. Hmm.
Language in these books relating to gender, race, weight, mental health, and violence, had all been cut out and revised. Including the removal of words like fat and ugly.
And other descriptions using the colors black and white.
Dr. Seuss also has presented many problems. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury might have seen this coming.
In fact, if you read Fahrenheit 451, there's a cota by Ray Bradbury.
Listen to this.
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady, telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, the Martian Chronicles.
But she added, this is Ray Bradbury. Wouldn't it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book, inserting more women's characters and roles.
A few years before that, I got a certain amount of male, concerning the same Martian book, complaining that the blacks in the book, were Uncle Toms. And why didn't I do them over?
Along then, came a note from a southern white. Suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks, and the entire story should be dropped.
Two weeks ago, my mountain of male delivered for a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house, that wanted to reprint my story, the fog horn in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse, as having a late-at-night illumination, coming from it, that was a God light.
Looking up at it, from the viewpoint of any sea creature, one would have felt that it was in the presence.
The editors had deleted God light and in the prisons. Some five years back, editors of yet another anthology for school readers.
Put together a volume with 400 -- count them! Four hundred short stories in it.
But how do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Bierce, all into one book?
Simplicity. Skin. Debone. Demarrow. Scarcify. Melt. Render down. And destroy.
Every adjective that counted. Every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito, out. Every simile, that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch, gone.
Any aside that explained the two bit philosophy of a first rate writer, lost.
Every story slenderized, starred, blue penciled, leeched, and bled white. Resembled every other story.
Twain read like Poe, which read like Shakespeare, which read like Dostoevsky. Which in the end, in the finale, read like Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant, attention, shot dead.
Do you -- do you begin to get the damned, incredible picture?
How did I react?
By firing the whole lot. By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. Now, this is in Fahrenheit 451.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people, running about with lit matches.
Every minority, be it Baptist, Unitarian, Irish Italian, Octogenerate -- you know what I'm trying to say.
Zen Buddhists, Zionists, Seventh Day Adventists, Women's Lib Republicans, all of these things, feels it has the will, the right, the duty, to douse the kerosene, and light the fuse.
Every dimwit editor who sees himself as a source of all dreary, vanilla-plain porridge, unleavened literature licks the guillotine, and eyes the neck of any author who dares speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
The fire captain in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from the book. And then until that day came, where books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
Shut the door. They're coming through the window. Shut the window. They're coming through the door, are the words to an old song.
They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher and censors every month.
Only six weeks ago, I discovered that over the years, some cubbyhole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from my novel.
Students, reading the novel, which after all, deals with censorship and book burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony.
Judy Lindell Ray, one of the new Ballantine editors is having the entire book, reset and republished this summer with all the damns and the hells back in place.
A final test for old Job 2 here.
I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago.
My play is based on the Moby-Dick mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew with a blind space captain, who ventured forth to encounter a great white comet and destroy the destroyer.
My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn. But for now, the university wrote back, that they hardly dared to do my play.
Because they had no women in it. And the ERA ladies on campus. Would descend with baseball bats, if the drama department even tried.
Grinding my bicuspids into powder. I suggested that that would mean, from now on, no more productions of boys in the band, no women. Or the women, no men.
Or counting heads, male and female. A good lot of Shakespeare, that would never be seen again, especially if you count the lines. And find that all the good stuff went to the males.
I wrote back that maybe they should do their play one week, and the women the next. They probably thought I was joking. But I'm not sure I wasn't.
He goes on, in sum, he's writing now, to this generation. In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, the finger choppings, or the lung deflations you plan for my works.
I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave, or make into a fist. My lungs to shout or whisper with.
I will not go gently on to a shelf de-gutted to become a nonbook. All of you umpires, back to the bleachers, the referees hit the showers.
This is my game. I hit, I pitch, I catch.
I run the bases.
At sunset, it's I that have won or lost.
And at sunrise, I'm out again. Giving it the old try. And no one can help me. Not even you.
That he wrote after they started editing Fahrenheit 451. What are we doing, gang?
Believe me. We are not the book burners, and as he just said, there are many ways to burn books.