For a few precious hours last week, I almost believed that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, fresh off a glitchy presidential campaign announcement that made him the laughingstock of the Twittersphere, might have to slip away from the national political scene and head back to some swamp in his home state.

But alas, that would never happen.

As odious as DeSantis is, it’s becoming increasingly clear that his culture war antics, especially his anti-trans, anti-black crusade to ban books that recently ensnared Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb, are more popular among Americans than they should be. are.

Recall that in the first 24 hours after DeSantis announced on Twitter Spaces that he would seek the Republican nomination, his campaign managed to raise a whopping $8.2 million from donors large and small. The haul included $1 million in one hour.

To put things in perspective, Joe Biden raised just $6.3 million in his first 24 hours as a presidential candidate in 2019. And late last year, Donald Trump only raised about $9.5 million in about six weeks after announcing he would run again.

So how should we feel about this apparent newfound love of censorship for what are often the most bigoted of reasons?

For advice, I decided to ask the man who helped me and millions of other Americans read LeVar Burton, the founder and star of the long-running PBS series Reading Rainbow.

On the same day DeSantis was booming about “wokeism” to the Twitter faithful, Burton was at ASU California in downtown Los Angeles giving a talk on the “State of Banned Books” with the LA Times Book Club. I caught up with him backstage, scrolling through Twitter.

“I’m shocked to discover that America is so attached to ignorance. I thought we were better than this. I really am,” Burton told me, shaking his head sadly. “Well, we’re not. So we have to deal with it. We have to fight back. And then we have to keep telling the truth.”

But what exactly does “fight back” and “tell the truth” mean?

Moments later, while on

podium with my colleague Steve Padilla, Burton brought Gorman, an Angeleno and

the

first National Youth Poet Laureate, as an example of both. She is supporting a lawsuit to challenge the ban and restrictions on books in Florida schools.

Her own book, The Hill We Climb, which is essentially the poem she read to an audience of millions at President Biden’s inauguration, was pulled from elementary school students in Miami-Dade County after a single parent complained it was written to cause confusion and indoctrinate students and contained “indirect hate messages.

Brace yourself for “hate” and “indoctrination.” This is what Gorman wrote:

We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We have learned that rest is not always peace. And the standards and conceptions of what is just is not always justice. And yet dawn has come before we knew it. One way or another we do.

Unsurprisingly, the parent who complained about “The Hill We Climb,” Daily Salinas of Miami Lakes

Custard.

, has a history of social media posts praising white supremacists and anti-Semitism. She also listed Oprah Winfrey as the author instead of Gorman.

I mean, all black women look alike, right?

“I don’t believe the woman read the book that could get her banned,” Burton joked.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has repeatedly dismissed the “The Hill We Climb” controversy as a “hoax”.

“No book is banned in the state of Florida

;

you can go b

And

y or use whatever book you want,” he urged on Twitter Spaces, eliciting murmurs of agreement from Elon Musk and cadre of other right-wing tech brethren. books are used in school, and then to make sure those books meet state standards and are appropriate for age and development.”

But this highly political focus on books in schools is about much more than that. It’s about getting another generation to subscribe to a white supremacist worldview by perpetuating ignorance about the lives and experiences of people from long-marginalized communities.

ace Gorman wrote on Twitter and Instagram: “Most of the banned works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on the bookshelf. Most of these censored works are by queer and non-white voices.”

Indeed, in a recent analysis by the Washington Post of books challenged in dozens of school districts in the years 2021-2021

20

In the 22nd school year, 43% of complaints related to books featuring LGBTQ characters and themes. Another 36% had main characters of color or explored issues of race and racism.

It’s the epitome of DeSantis’ hateful, ‘anti-woke’ agenda and it’s no coincidence.

“A person in control of the story has control over how you will or will not be remembered as part of the historical record,” Burton said. “And so this is really a battle for truth. It’s a battle for reality. It’s a battle for control.”

The scary thing is that it seems to work.

A new poll found that nearly 60% of American adults believe a person’s sex is determined at birth and therefore, in fact, do not believe it is possible to be transgender. A majority also supports policies targeting trans children, reflecting what has been introduced and in many cases passed in dozens of Republican-led legislatures over the past year.

“They lie and they lie and they lie, until the lie becomes the truth in some people’s minds,” Burton told me.

This is what fighting back means. It refuses to be quiet about what’s really at stake for the country and its most vulnerable residents, while DeSantis and his fellow Republican politicians try to make book bans sound perfectly normal and reasonable.

“I didn’t see this coming,” Burton admitted, “so I’m not going to try to predict what’s going to happen next.

,

I feel like we’re in the eye of the storm and

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or perhaps the leading edge of the storm. We haven’t gotten to the eye wall yet. And just me

,

I have no idea what’s behind it. But I know we have to be ready. We must be vigilant. We must be prepared and we must be fighters for the truth.”