Patrick Enlists UT for Book Banning Saga
While Making Alamo Book Rich in Process

Capitol Inside
July 18, 2021

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has given the new book Forget the Alamo a rocket boost with the attention that it's received from his personal crusade to discredit it as a timely testament to critical race theory that Texas Republicans have discovered in recent months and want to outlaw now.

Forget the Alamo made its debut as a New York Times Best Sellers list on Sunday night in the 11th spot on the list for hardback fiction - a feat that might have been all but impossible in the same short span of time without Patrick's epic attempts to ban it as leftist propaganda designed to smear the Lone Star State.

But a number one ranking on the Times list before the end of July could be well within reach with a special panel that Patrick is pressing the University of Texas to sponsor as a stage for him to expose Forget the Alamo as a cancel culture ripoff with a group of historians there to make his case.

Patrick has singled-handed elevated the book's three authors - Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford - into a league with Henry Miller, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck and D.H. Lawrence as legendary American writers who gained fame initially when their most famous works were banned in some states in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Burrough the collaborator on the new Alamo book is no relation to William S. Burroughs - one of the original beat generation writers whose novel Naked Lunch was banned in the courts in Boston for a brief time in 1962. One of Burroughs' good friends and fellow writers - Allen Ginsberg - was acquitted five years earlier of obscenity charges in San Francisco based on the poem Howl.

The Forget the Alamo writers might have more in common with Harriet Beecher Stowe - an abolitionist who penned the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin - an all time classic that was banned by the Confederacy during the Civil War as a result of an unflattering portrayal slavery. Patrick contends that Forget the Alamo is a fraud that seeks to impugn the state's history, culture and values by making it appear like the battle of the Alamo revolved on slavery.

"The authors of Forget the Alamo are not historians — one is a Democrat operative and the other two are newspaper reporters," Patrick contended when he announced late last week that the state's flagship university in Austin had agreed to host the panel discussion at UT - hopefully in the next two weeks.

Patrick might find it difficult to find historians from the actual staff in the history department at UT for the event that will show why he ordered the Bullock Texas State History Museum last month to pull the plug on a presentation that several hundred were planning to attend just two hours before it was set to begin. No institution of higher education would ever want to be associated with government sponsored censorship like Patrick has appeared to be promoting with the state's largest public university as a collaborator.

But Patrick hasn't seem to care that a dramatically higher number of people will be reading Forget the Alamo as a direct consequence of his antics. That could be a sign that Patrick might be on the verge of making history as the first elected official to ban a number one best seller that wouldn't have been without him.

 

 

 

 

 

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