Hannah-Book-Bannah and the CCDF's cheap scam

A whole lot of fake drama about "Drama" from a lazy, unprincipled, lying, open scam of a "political" group. And it gives us good ground upon which to fight them and smash them.

Hannah Peterson is the woman leading the so-called County Citizens Defending Freedom’s book-banning brigade in Polk County. That’s her on the left.

If you’re a Lakelander or regular PE1 reader, you might know this parent-hating book-banner as the person who helped failed Lakeland mayoral candidate Saga Stevin produce 111 lies in one 28-minute interview a few months ago.

When Saga met Hannah: 111 lies in 28 minutes

That was before the people of Lakeland humiliated Saga Stevin back into whatever oblivion of absurdity she crawled out of.

Hannah’s blackmail

Hannah Peterson essentially blackmailed Polk Superintendent Fred Heid with the notion that Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd would come into a school and march a sweet school librarian out in handcuffs because a kid checked out Beloved.

You can hear it in Heid’s quote to Lakeland Now, when announcing the temporary removal of the books for “review” at the district.

“While it is not the role of my office to approve/evaluate instructional or resource materials at that level, I do have an obligation to review any allegation that a crime is being or has been committed,” Heid wrote in an email sent Monday evening. “It is also my obligation to provide safeguards to protect our employees.”

Mind you, CCDFers have not read these books. They are a subset of a bigger list targeted by a national network of virtually identical fake grassroots anti-social groups funded by big business interests who want to use culture warriors to advance their unrelated business interests politically. These groups are using excerpts other people have pulled and sent them. They don’t do their own work.

Polk’s book ban is a lazy, cut-and-paste culture war scam.

Hannah Peterson doesn’t know or care what the books say. The next original idea or sincere principle CCDF — Steve Maxwell, Jimmy Nelson, Hannah Peterson — shares with the public will be its first.

Grady Judd: “That’s a School Board matter.”

Hannah does care that she can blackmail the Polk District with Grady Judd’s guns and handcuffs. That’s how raw power works. The implicit, credible threat of Grady Judd arresting a sweet librarian is what underlies the district’s action.

And that’s on Grady Judd — who does nothing to discourage it because people like Saga and Hannah and the Capitol Lynch folks are his core base of political and social power. And Grady likes power.

The implicit threat that Grady’s political and social allies can trump up criminal charges that he will abuse his office to act upon is a major source of his power, along with his mouth.

That’s why it’s important to force Grady Judd’s power and mouth into explicit positions. That’s what I was trying to do when I asked about the sheriff’s willingness to arrest people over possession and distribution of these books. And this is how Grady Judd’s spokesman Scott Wilder responded:

“Hey Billy. That’s a school board issue—we are not involved. No criminal complaint filed with us.”

Sorry, Hannah-Book-Bannah. Grady just blew up your blackmail. It’s a sweet librarian too far, even for him.

The banned books, by the numbers, for those of us looking to make them available privately

I suspect these books will get returned to school libraries as the scam becomes clearer and Grady offers no muscle. But we’ll see.

If they don’t, this circulation spreadsheet gives us a good idea of what books to buy for privately managed distribution.

The circulation chart above shows that five of the 16 have not been checked out of a Polk school library in the last two years. Another five have been checked out fewer than five times.

So 10 of 16 books the CCDF is sooooooo sincerely worried will corrupt the morals of youth have been checked out a total of 10 times in two years.

So much drama about Drama

And then there’s Drama. It’s a phenomenon, as you can see in these fun charts that follow. It accounts for 81 percent of all checkouts on this list in the last two years.

I am an old. Thus, I had never heard of Drama until CCDF gave it free publicity it apparently does not need.

What’s so titillating and dangerous about Drama that made more than 500 Polk students want to read it in the last two years? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Here’s the Amazon description. It’s pretty salacious (LOL):

Go on offense and smash them. Without Grady’s guns, the CCDF is nothing.

I have often debated, jousted, collaborated, and engaged my self-described “conservative” fellow citizens productively in my years of public life. And I respect their points of view enough to consider them and speak the truth about their ideas and principles, as I see it.

But these CCDF people are different. They have no ideas or principles. Their “ideas” are literally obsessions with anuses (see story here) and calling people not in on their their scams AINOs, Americans in Name Only (AINO). Here’s CCDF inheritance-baby leader Steve Maxwell doing it.

Like Saga Stevin as a mayoral candidate, the people trying to ban these books they haven’t read — and don’t care about — are petty power hungry scammers and nothing more.

All scams are zero sum games. You either get scammed or you don’t. It’s important for us to recognize that. There is no collaborative solution to these anti-parent, anti-human, anti-social buffoons trying to scam you out of your educational resources and torment your vulnerable children for fun.

They have to be smashed politically and culturally, just like we smashed Hannah Peterson’s buddy Saga.

Fortunately, without Grady Judd’s muscle, these people are nothing. And “book-banning” is good ground to smash people on. Even the usual trolls I run into on social media about this absurd issue say things like, “I don’t believe in banning books, but …”

Sorry, CCDFers and assorted parent-hating book banners. If you ban books, you believe in banning books. And I will never ever ever let you wriggle off the hook about it.