That is the cruelest irony of Wolf's antics at eateries in both Manhattan and Salem. At the same time as she was absorbing and appropriating the language of the civil rights movement, many of her fellow travelers in the Mirror World were actively fighting to suppress all attempts to tell a truer story of America's past, claiming that, like masks and vaccines, teaching students about the reality of racism in their country is a form of child abuse. They are the ones pushing for laws calling for only "patriotic" history to be taught and for books to be banned-because, as the historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, knowing history demands doing something about its legacies in the present: These collective efforts have made a mockery of public conversations about the history of American racism and xenophobia-and, in some contexts, have made them all but impossible.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about critical race theory bans, 'patriotic education' laws, and book bans currently sweeping US school districts.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 835