When you’re completely out of ideas.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday vowed to pass legislation punishing public schools that do not remove graphic books from their shelves by knocking them down a notch in the state’s annual school performance ratings, which the state uses to seize control of underperforming districts.
Flanked by easels displaying printed covers of books he found obscene, the lieutenant governor said school boards and administrators have not been following a 2025 law aimed at weeding out lewd books from the shelves in Texas’ more than 9,000 campuses attended by some 5.5 million schoolchildren.
“It’s the law and we expect you to follow the law. So we’re coming for the books,” Patrick said during a news conference at the Texas Capitol. “We ask that you do it on your own and remove these books.”
The law from last year, Senate Bill 13, granted school boards the authority to approve and remove books based on complaints they receive, such as those from parents and activist groups. Before, those powers largely belonged to school librarians. But Patrick said an overwhelming majority of school boards have not taken any action, as the law nears one year in effect.
Patrick said the books on display at his news conference — which he said are on the shelves of some Texas schools despite being prohibited in state prisons — were “so filthy, so dirty, so vulgar, so pornographic” that he refused to open them out of respect for the women in the room.
He insisted the state was not banning books.
“There are no books banned in America. You can buy any book you want to buy if you want it,” he said. “But we do not take taxpayer money and buy these books for our schools.”
He was joined onstage for this crusade by some nutball activist, whose name I can’t be bothered to find, because who cares. The word for this is pathetic, and I have a very hard time believing that in this year, with everything else that’s going on, that anyone who isn’t already all in on this idea will be moved by it. Maybe, I guess, it could motivate a few disgruntled wingnuts to the polls who might have sat it out otherwise. Color me skeptical.
I’m going to close with some tweets, because that’s the level of response this deserves.
Right after Gov Abbott committed to suporting Texas public schools if reelected, Abbott took aim at those schools for “foreign influence” and now Little Gov Patrick is threatening schools’ funding and campus A-F letter grades over “filthy” books on library shelves #TxLege
— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 11:04 AM – 19 August 2026
Never seen Little Gov @DanPatrick so desperate to change the subject. Texans are worried about rising costs of gas & groceries, data centers, transmission lines, Big Bend border wall construction, etc and he’s railing about “filthy books” he already banned from school libraries
— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 11:14 AM – 19 August 2026
Very powerful message in previous elections, just like this man used to be the stone-cold killer at the center of Texas politics. Been a minute since that has felt the case.
— Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) 11:04 AM – 19 August 2026
Dems may or may not be able to do it this year, but either way we’ve approached the point at which the political wave that came in in 2014 feels finally and totally exhausted. I’m not really looking forward to what comes next, though!
— Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) 11:17 AM – 19 August 2026
Heres how she describes the rating system. Her list does not cite passages or give any explanation for what led to each book rating.
— Robert Downen (@RobertDownen_) 5:05 PM – 19 August 2026
Okay, fine, there’s the name of Patrick’s wingnut wingwoman. How many of those 750 books do you think she’s actually read, and how many do you think she got ChatGPT to summarize for her? Nobody is as obsessed with “pornography” as the professional censorship zealots.
Still, “we’re coming for the books” is a super awful and chilling thing to read.
OUR CONTEMPORARY BONFIRES OF VANITIES & SUNDRY STRUGGLES
It seems to me that the real problem is the the Right and the Left – to simplify the dichotomy – will want to suppress different kinds of books, and that the matter of an appropriate selection of texts for young readers really requires a lot more nuance.
It’s easy to rail against the book burners or their modern equivalent.
But, as with any library, discretion and judgment always has to be exercised because shelf space is limited: What do we decided we can dispense with to make more room, and – more importantly – what do we spend an always limited budget on. With public schools, after all, it’s public money. And there is never enough. So the “we” in respect to the choice is warranted. And since there can be no agreement on what is good for students by way of library material, the choices about books – what to acquire and what to keep – ought to be made at the local level.
MULTIPLE CHOICE EXERCISE
Suppose a downsizing is required: Which would be the best candidate to get rid of: The Koran, The Old Testament, On War, Mein Kampf, War & Peace, or the Communist Manifesto?
The obvious and easy choice is Mein Kampf because that’s in German; but what if it’s an annotated translation using the original title, or a critical bi-lingual edition with lots of footnotes by historians of the Third Reich?
Another scenario: What if the scholastic book-quality reviewers don’t have time to read it themselves: What if you were to sit on a review committee and along comes a title with several hundred others that says: MY STRUGGLE. Don’t we all have them?
YOU STRUGGLING? – ME TOO
Supposing they still offer German at Bellaire HS, would a book about combat (Kampf) be suitable as far as original text goes: If not, what about Der Schüler Gerber (Pupil Gerber), whose protagonist is an adolescent suffering under the yoke of a sadistic teacher who ends up committing suicide, thinking he failed and won’t graduate and go on to university (Spoiler alert: he did not fail, but it was too late). Should youngersts be reading books about other youngsters killing themselves (and no longer being around to do the regretting)? How about Goethe’s Werther? A classic.
In Germany, Mein Kampf (though no longer out of print via copyright restriction) is not read in school, but Schuler Gerber was part of the post-WWII literary canon. Texas isn’t Germany, of course, but the question of teen suicides is neither new nor country-specific. It has long been and remains a sensitive and troublesome issue. But then again, it’s mostly boys offing themselves, and that kind of disparity is a taboo on the Left. Lamenting school shootings is safer than the acknowledging and probing the mental and emotional struggles of young males trying to find their place in our crazy world.
Which is not to say that selection of female-centric young adult literature is free of controversy or discomfort.
What about the Diary of a Young Girl? Anyone taking offense about a 15-year-old going on 16 setting out to conquer the affections of an older lad named Peter and offering thoughts of her very own about sex-ed along with rather mean-spirited condemnations of her mother. While adoring her dad.
And what about the ethics about the estate publishing the intimate unexpurgated thoughts and observations of a teen in puberity discovering what’s in her heart and between her legs? Versus the ethics of deleting them?
Perhaps it would make for an age-appropriate topic for a high school essay: Compare the enhanced edition with the original one that Papa Frank sanitized. Of course, that would double the burdens of reading (2, not just 1 to plow through), and it would require a well-stocked library. If Dan Patrick had his way, the expanded edition would not be available. So no critical analysis of the moral quandaries of profiting off the intimate thoughts of a teen in hiding who never got to be the acclaimed writer she aspired to become (at least not in her lifetime).
But now we have not only world literature in libraries. We have the web … so does any of this even matter?
Now students don’t just have Google, but AI to answer any question.
Like this one: How does the newer edition of Anne Frank’s diary compare to the older one?
And that’s the real problem we ought to tackle: Thinking and reflecting is no longer needed.
Books are passé.
Whodunnit? – Technology.
You can’t deny it: It’s efficient.
Further food for thought:
https://www.banned-books.org/books/mein-kampf