After Florida adopted its benchmarks for
excellent student thinking standards in 2020,
the Department of Education distributed recommended reading lists and it said
that it included the top of the line literary works with world renowned titles.
And obviously William Shakespeare should be in that list.
I mean, not that difficult, Shakespeare shouldn't be controversial,
but apparently it is in the state of Florida.
Teachers are now shying away from the author to comply with Ron DeSantis'state
law restricting books and instruction about sexual content.
And apparently some of Shakespeare's work has elements that
are just too racy for conservative parents.
And so instead of actually having the literary work in its entirety,
they're only gonna allow excerpts, just excerpts from his work okay.
So English teachers in Hillsborough County are preparing lessons for
the new school year with only excerpts from William Shakespeare's works.
Students will be assigned pages from the classics, which might include Macbeth,
Hamlet, and the time-honored teen favorite Romeo and Juliet.
But if they want to read them in their entirety,
they will likely have to do it on their own time.
Sounds great for education, this is fantastic, how wonderful.
I'm assuming this is what in high school?
Let me tell these parents something, your kids have seen worse, much, much worse.
>> Speaker 2: They're looking at worse right now.
>> As we speak, absolutely.
Your kids aren't precious little angels, they live in a society and
in this society where mass media sells sex incessantly.
Are you really gonna delude yourself into thinking that censoring Shakespeare is
gonna protect your precious little angels from knowing about sex?
>> Speaker 2: Yeah.
>> What is this?
>> Like you would be so lucky if what they were doing was reading Shakespeare.
>> For real.
>> Honestly.
>> It's so true.
>> If they put down the Andrew Tate TikTok video to read a Midsummer Night Stream,
you're doing okay at that point, I think.
And by the way, it's old timey language,
they're not even gonna know what he was talking about.
I barely did, and I read a lot growing up only Bret gets it, he's the only person
who reads it recreationally for the pornographic content.
Most people,
it'll go way over their head, they won't even know what they're referring to.
>> Speaker 1: Bret Ehrlich, who hosts Happy Half Hour here at TYT and does very
important programming work behind the scenes, is a fanatic for Shakespeare.
And I think we need to do a wellness check to make sure he's okay.
>> Speaker 2: Maybe the reason he is such know,
interesting character is because his mind has been rotted by years of Shakespeare.
>> Speaker 1: Maybe. >> Speaker 2: Yeah, look,
this is obviously ridiculous, the idea that Shakespeare should be unacceptable.
And by the way, it's not even in this case that they're being ordered to it's
that Florida has created intentionally such a culture of fear that teachers and
librarians don't wanna be locked up for the rest of their life.
So they're looking for things to censor so that they can save themselves.
And so that's arguably worse and some people might think, well, God,
this is backfiring, this could encapsulate some conservative literature, too.
First of all, there's not much, second of all, they don't care,
they're not worried that the next generation isn't gonna be creative or
open minded or cultured or whatever.
They're not interested in that, this is only a problem for
people who are not terrified of literally everything they see.
>> Speaker 1: Now, Joseph Cool, who's a high school teacher,
says about this whole debacle, there's some raunchiness in Shakespeare because
that's what sold tickets during his time, and that's what sells tickets now.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah.
>> Right and again, I just can't emphasize enough how ridiculous
it is to freak out over Shakespeare in high school classes knowing
what high school students see with their own two eyes on a daily basis,
both online and in the real world in advertisements and mass media.
Like, this is insane.
So Cool makes a really good point, and that same argument is being used
in the Florida approved PragerU children's videos.
So remember, while things like Shakespeare are being censored,
Florida has approved PragerU, a politicized propaganda machine,
to essentially have their materials used in education there.
So let's take a look at this next video.
>> Speaker 3: Slavery, you didn't deny that.
>> Speaker 4: Deny?
No, slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,
even amongst the people I just left.
Being taken as a slave is better than being killed.
No, I don't see the problem.
>> Speaker 3: Well, in our time, we view slavery as being evil and terrible.
>> Speaker 4: Magnifico, that's wonderful, I am glad humanity has reached
such a time but you said you're from 500 years in the future.
How can you come here to the 15th century and
judge me by your standards from the 21st century?
>> Speaker 2: That is laughably, condescending to the audience.
>> Speaker 1: That is okay and very clearly, it's propaganda, that's exactly-
>> That's all it is.
>> Speaker 1: That's all it is, that is okay, that has been approved,
but Shakespeare in its entirety without just resorting to excerpts, not allowed.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, too raunchy.
>> Speaker 1: This is actually gonna make kids want to read Shakespeare more.
I think it's gonna have the opposite effect, which is gonna be hilarious.
>> I think best case scenario coming out of this, kids wanna read Shakespeare,
some of these other band books and whatever I publish,
that's best case scenario for American society.
But I love how condescending that is to the people of the past, but
also the people today.
Like, how could you judge us by the standards of 500 years from now?
First of all, slavery did not end 500 years ago, you jackass, and
I think you know that.
Second of all, there were people then that thought it was bad to have slaves.
That was not some new technology that we developed in the 70s the idea that if you
lock someone up, beat them, rape them, separate their family, murder them,
work them into the ground, force them to not be educated, that that's a bad thing.
I think the slave masters at the time would have thought if it happened to them,
that was bad.
And we didn't come up with empathy in the 70s, either people knew it,
they did it anyway.
Crimes have been committed for personal profit throughout time,
that doesn't mean people were under delusions that it was ethical.
>> Speaker 1: And by the way, I just wanna go to one other Prager video.
This is the one that's been getting a lot of attention lately online.
But in case you missed it, basically it's Frederick Douglass
spreading lies about America's history of slavery.
So have you seen this video?
>> Speaker 2: I have not seen this, I don't watch any of these.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah.
>> I don't live in Florida, and I'm not a kid.
>> Speaker 1: This went viral online considering how this is the kind of
approved material that can be used in public schools.
Let's watch.
>> Speaker 5: Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and
wrong.
And they knew that it would do terrible harm to the nation.
They wanted it to end.
But their first priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country.
The Southern colonies were dependent on slave labor, and
they wouldn't have joined a union that had banned it.
>> Speaker 3: Are you okay with that?
>> Speaker 5: I'm certainly not okay with slavery.
But the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great,
the making of the United States.
It was America that began the conversation, to end it.
But Leo is correct that big problems need to be approached very carefully.
Have you kids heard of William Lloyd Garrison?
>> Speaker 3: No.
>> Speaker 1: Nope.
>> Speaker 5: He's an abolitionist like me, and he and I used to be friends, but
we aren't any longer.
We don't agree how to solve problems, William refuses all compromises,
demands immediate change, and if he doesn't get what he wants,
he likes to set things on fire.
>> Speaker 3: Sounds familiar.
>> Speaker 5: Sounds like you know the type.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, we've got that type in our time.
>> Speaker 3: So you're trying to work for change inside of the American system?
>> Speaker 5: Precisely, Leila.
>> Speaker 1: Man.
>> Speaker 2: [LAUGH] I love that, I don't find that nearly as bad as the first one.
I mean, the animation is terrible, the voice acting is utterly horrible.
>> Speaker 2: No, voice acting is just top notch.
>> Speaker 2: But the biggest issue for me there is the but
America is the person who started the conversation.
Yeah, America, like all of it, everybody in America was just they were like,
you know what we should probably talk about ending this thing.
Don't generalize to protect people which Americans wanted
to have that conversation?
Which Americans did want to have that conversation?
I don't know, this is gonna blow your mind.
There are Americans, even to today,
that aren't comfortable with a conversation about how bad slavery is.
They make videos like the one we just watched.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, this is all so depressing-
>> Really fast, I love,
effectively what we're seeing, which is animated blackface.
You have rich white conservatives creating fictional versions
of historic black Americans to spread their white racist lies, that is wild.
>> Speaker 1: I just have a really big problem with this current climate of
politicizing everything that should not be politicized, including education.
And especially at a time when we have a very real problem of
students not even being able to read, I mean, what are we doing?
Using public schools as a political battleground in order to
implement your political propaganda is gross.
And it's gross regardless of which side does it obviously in the state of Florida,
clearly the right wing is doing it, and
it's just gonna dumb people down further that's what the goal is here, right?
To propagandize, to politicize and
to honestly take away from instruction that actually empowers these
students with the education they need to thrive in the future.
That's what's happening here.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah.
>> Speaker 2: Anyway. >> But
don't worry, I mean, if the education system fails you,
they'll push you into working at like a chicken processing plant at 14.
>> Speaker 1: Look, I don't wanna be conspiratorial, but
it appears to be the goal, especially when simultaneously with all of these
anti-education efforts, they're trying to loosen child labor laws.
>> Speaker 1: Yep.
>> We've done so many stories of child labor laws already being violated, and
they keep doing it over and over again because they just get a slap on the wrist.
These companies just pay a fine, and then they look at the profits they made by
underpaying minors for the work that they're doing illegally.
>> Speaker 2: Some of them die.
>> Speaker 1: Some of them die, we did a story about a Guatemalan teenager at
a poultry plant who was killed in an accident, he was in an area of the poultry
plant that he wasn't even supposed to be in, right?
But the company gets a fine and that's it, they're done with it, they'll do it again.
In fact, they do it again and again, they repeat the crime because if it's just
a fine, if they don't have to worry about actual criminal consequences for
what they're doing,
they're gonna keep doing it because it's going to help them maximize their profits.
It's that simple.