Books, a Billionaire and a murderer whose middle name is Satan (for real).
That was my week. Read on...
We are about to lock up librarians. Seriously.
Let’s start with how fucking ridiculous it is that our bonkers country is wallowing in this bullshit culture war.
I spat out my coffee over the weekend when I was catching up on news and saw that Maryland introduced a “Freedom to Read” bill.
What the fuck? We now have to pass a law guaranteeing our access to books?
We haven’t seen book banning like this since Nazi Germany—the signs are all there that we are swinging toward the “seriously fucked” marker on the pendulum.
It gets worse. The law also has a few lines about protecting librarians, who are being demoted, punished and even threatened for doing their jobs.
I talked to the president of the state’s librarian association and can’t believe the shit they’re going through.
The book banners are largely ignorant knobs—most of them are with Moms for Liberty, which I call Book Ban Barbies. They scream about big government, then want government to do their parenting for them by banning books. Lemme say it in a font they might understand:
THEY DON’T GET TO DECIDE WHAT MY KIDS CAN READ. I DO. IT’S CALLED FREEDOM AND PARENTING.
Don’t want your kid to read certain books? Then parent them. Have the sack to be the bad guy who tells them, “no.”
(And then get your bail money ready if they become insurrectionists because they’re numbshits who weren’t taught critical thinking.)
This is Book Ban Barbie successfully convincing a school board in Maryland to remove more than 50 books from their shelves. Kit Hart worked as a medical account executive for five years before changing her LinkedIn to “Full Time Mommy”. She believes that she — more so than educators who have higher degrees and decades of experience working with kids and shaping curriculum — knows what all the kids in Maryland should be allowed to read.
Oh, and take a look at their lurid, filthy, porny, raunchy cheat code (don’t forget one of the groups founders was being investigated for a sex crime in Florida and admitted to doing a three-way with the hubs and a chick: Florida Mom Sex Scandal) for figuring out which books to clutch their pearls over. They’re too fucking lazy to read any of the books they ban. They just consult a list totally out-of-context dirty parts. I linked to it in the column:.
We now have to pass laws to save books
It gets even worse in West Virginia, which is voting on a bill allowing librarians and educators to be fined and prosecuted if they let a kid check out a book that is “obscene,” whatever that means.
Remember this Virginia mom who said Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winner “Beloved” gave her son nightmares? That shit's supposed to give everyone nightmares, lady. Slavery was a sadistic, amoral, horrifiying nightmare. Let your kid learn that.
How Bad is the Crime?
Last week I went into D.C.’s Chinatown to talk about the crime wave that’s allegedly pushing billionaire Ted Leonsis to yank the Caps and the Wizards out of D.C. and set them up—thanks to Virginia tax dollars—across the river.
You’d think crime would be skyrocketing to cause such a drastic move, one that will impact thousands of blue-collar workers in D.C. and crater an important, downtown development, right?
Take a look at the column to see how huge this crime wave is. I pulled the police numbers for that neighborhood, it’s truly shocking:
The crime in Chinatown is catching all the blame.
And while billionaire owner Ted Leonsis justifies this, he said his biggest fear is that a sports fan will be attacked.
And sure enough, I found great details about the attack on a hockey fan. Check out the column to see what happened…
Who gets a second chance?
The column in today’s paper was tough.
I had a name up at my desk for years when I came to The Post: “Vidalina Semino”.
She was a waitress, like my mom. She was in immigrant with frizzy hair, like my mom. They were even born the same year and month, 54 that year. This one hit close to home.
As she was leaving her shift at a fancy D.C. hotel and heading to her car, she was kidnapped, stuffed in her trunk, her ATM cards were used and then she was taken to the woods, where she tried to run away but was hunted down and killed. They broke her arm as she was trying to break free.
This was in the year 2000 and her case was a mess—lots of wrong turns by the coroner and cops. She’s in textbooks now and her name was on my desk for more than a decade to remind me to keep reporting, to tell everyone’s story, to realize that any of those crime victims that are a line in a police report could be my mom.
One of her killers was just released and I interviewed him. I remember typing his name in the story of his arrest 24 years ago: Gene Satan Downing. Yes, Satan. Which we decided to leave out of the printed column this time.
He was one of three guys I interviewed—all admitted murderers who got life sentences when they were young—who are now free thanks to the second-look laws that have been retraumatizing the victims who testify at those release hearings.
Column: Do we owe young offenders a second chance?
Take a look at the column and see what he told me. I don’t know if I hit the right balance of allowing for redemption, but resisting erasure of the victims, who never got a second chance. What do you think?