During her remarks Saturday evening to a fundraising dinner for the Los Angeles chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, First Lady Jill Biden compared school parents' concerns over explicit reading material in elementary schools to the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
Biden first discussed the $1.2-trillion spending package signed by her husband, President Joe Biden, earlier in the day. She told her audience that Democrats "had to fend off more than 50 anti-gay amendments that Republicans tried to force" into the bill.
She then explained her picture of how democracies crumble and the roles played by school parents and others. (Read related op-ed: A demonic version of 'democracy')
Jill Biden: "History teaches us that democracies don't disappear overnight. They disappear slowly, subtly, silently – a book ban, a court decision, a 'don't say gay' law. Before World War II, I'm told, Berlin was the center of LGBTQ culture in Europe. One group of people loses their rights … and then another and another until one morning you wake up, and you no longer live in a democracy."
Local school boards and legislation in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Virginia, New York and other states have banned or are working to ban books they consider to include explicit material, according to various media reports.
Concerns and efforts to remove books were well under way in 2022 when a majority of those banned dealt with gender and LGBTQ themes. Other themes included sexual content, race and racism.
Dr. Dave Brat, dean of Liberty University's School of Business, discussed Mrs. Biden's remarks on Washington Watch Monday. The irony here, he said, is the "importance of the Judeo-Christian tradition to all the values that liberals used to like."
"In case [the liberals] missed the memo, the Protestants founded Harvard, Yale, Princeton. All the publics trained and all believed in modern democracy. The Republic, the Constitution, the rule of law and the Judeo-Christian tradition uniquely came up with the entire human rights apparatus and language of the Modern Period after the Enlightenment. So, the confusion is, what exact rights are we talking about?" Brat wondered.
Exactly what are 'rights' in 2024?
Brat told show host Tony Perkins that the Left is redefining rights. "The Constitution was set up to protect minority rights, but the rights back then were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The question these days is whose rights get to trump other rights," he stated.
Brat said the Christians who founded those universities stepped back, but the Left shows no willingness to include other ideas.
"They want to impose their will. They expect Christians to give up their rights. This is the Modern Period."
In the 1930s, Nazi-dominated student groups burned books they declared to be "un-German." This was documented to have occurred in 34 university towns and cities. Words of prominent Jewish, liberal and leftist writers ended up on bonfires, according to The U.S. Holocaust Museum.
"The book burnings stood as a powerful symbol of Nazi intolerance and censorship," the museum writes.
Left-leaning politicians in the U.S. and leadership on college campuses have been some of the strongest voices of antisemitism since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Rep. Rashida Talib (R-Michigan) was censured by her House colleagues last November over her remarks regarding the Israel-Hamas war. The resolution censures Talib for "promoting false narratives regarding the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel."
On U.S. campuses, Jews feel threatened. "It pains me to have to say, sadly, that Jew hate and antisemitism is thriving on this campus," Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad said in The New York Times in December. "Twenty-six years I've given my life to this community. I've never felt so alone."
Here are some real Nazi comparisons
Brat argues that if Jill Biden wants to see examples of Nazi behavior, she should consider these and not the school parents who oppose gender narratives being taught to impressionable children who have not expressed confusion.
"[Look at] the rights of Jewish students just to be able to go to class today," Brat offered. "When you want to look at the attack of the Brownshirts back under Hitler, that was all brought to you by the big state.
"Well, we conservatives – we constitutional republic-loving conservatives – we want a small state so that can never happen. You have the separation of powers in the House and the Senate and then the Executive and the Judiciary [branches], all protecting the rights of minorities so that that can never happen again."
While the first lady rails against banned books, Brat contended that the flow of information is actually on her side.
"The Big Tech firms are all run by avowed leftists. None of them are big Republican donors or conservatives anymore," he pointed out. "So, the American people just haven't caught up with that, right? They think Republicans are all the rich fat cats. Not anymore.
"Things are inverted [and] this election cycle is going to see a huge, probably populist move versus the globalist – not your old standard Republican versus Democrat," Brat predicted.
