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Free Speech Group Slams Portland School’s Ban On Global Warming Skeptic Book

(REUTERS/Mal Langsdon)

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Chris White Tech Reporter
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Elementary school students continue to get barraged by pro-climate justice warrior propaganda, as a prominent free speech organization claims a Portland, Oregon decision to ban school textbooks authored by global warming skeptics could “undermine public education.”

The Portland Public Schools Board voted to “abandon the use of any adopted text material that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities” in an effort to appease green activists who continue to enact fatwas against global warming skeptics.

The move has raised the hackles of anti-censorship group National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which blasted the school board’s decision in a press statement released Friday. NCAC called the decision “dangerously over-broad, potentially affecting a wide range of valuable educational materials.”

The statement went on to explain that such policies only hurt the students by shielding them from ideas on climate change.

“Social studies texts accurately describing the political debate around fossil fuels and climate change, for instance, would presumably contain comments from individuals who ‘express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis,” the statement read. “If such material is excised from the curriculum, will students be prepared to face – and argue with – climate-change denial when they encounter it in the world outside school?”

Purging the school system of inconvenient ideas on global warming, the statement added, “will undermine public education, which should equip students for critical and informed consideration of important matters of public policy and controversy.”

Climate change is still subject to ongoing debate, the group noted further, so students should be mentally equipped to handle all angles of the discussion.

The school board’s ban comes shortly after a sixth grade teacher at Blackhawk Middle School in Madison, Minnesota, invited hip-hop artists into three of her science classes to instruct her students on how to make rap songs demonizing fossil fuels and glorifying policies meant to curb so-called man-made global warming.

“It’s been a huge motivator,” sixth grade teacher Kate Lewandowski told reporters last week. “I have students that haven’t cared much about science and haven’t put in much of an effort, even though they’re very capable. With this project, I’ve seen so many students like that turning in their assignments, raising their hand in class and asking questions — I haven’t seen that all semester.”

New York’s Democratic attorney general (AG) Eric Schneiderman, who is leading a group of attorneys general in an investigation of Exxon Mobil for fraud, made some disturbing comments at an event he co-hosted in March, in which he floated the idea of enacting harsher penalties beyond fines for groups supposedly misleading the public on global warming.

“Financial damages alone may be insufficient,” Schneiderman said during the event. “The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.”

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