Fighting against GOP hypocrisy and banned books | Letters to the editor
Thanks to Sun Sentinel columnist Fred Grimm for calling out Republican Party hypocrites, especially Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who has admitted to three-way trysts, and her husband Christian Ziegler, the deposed chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, who’s accused of rape.
We wouldn’t care about these people except that their phony moralism has done such damage to our state and our public education. Thanks to Moms for Liberty, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-supermajority Legislature, Florida is plagued by a litany of racist, homophobic and xenophobic laws that erased the existence of LGBTQ+ kids, dismissed Black Americans’ and Hispanics’ struggles as “woke” and claimed that slavery had “benefits.” Our teachers work in fear, state college and university professors fight gag orders, and hundreds of important books have been banned.
I decided to fight back by giving students the books their government stole from them and teaching them to defend their liberties. Join us! Come to the big Read Banned Books Corp. rally at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 20 at the Countess de Hoernle Theatre at Spanish River High School, 5100 Jog Rd., Boca Raton.
Our amazing guest speakers include Renee O’Connor, a history teacher who left the classroom in protest of DeSantis’ whitewashed curriculum, because, as she said, “I will not tell lies.” She was one of four finalists out of 18,000 people nominated for Miami-Dade Teacher of the Year and helped draft the College Board’s highly praised AP African-American History course that DeSantis rejected as too “woke.” For more information, write to readbannedbooksusa@gmail.com.
June S. Neal, Delray Beach
In praise of Fred Grimm
I write to again thank you for publishing Fred Grimm’s essays. They are always insightful, well-researched and clever. Please keep this local treasure’s columns coming.
Way back in the before times in October 2019, Grimm wrote a great exposé on Moscow-by-the-Sea, also known as Sunny Isles Beach, which had become overrun with Russians who were rather blatantly laundering their rubles through Trump-owned condos there. You published my letter in December of that year encouraging the Sun Sentinel to follow up on that, as had Reuters, the Miami Herald and the Daily Beast, but nothing came of it. Goes to show what money and power can do.
Two impeachments, four indictments and another run for the White House later, another Pulitzer Prize is still waiting to be redeemed, and we need that investigation now more than ever. You can’t keep relying on a semi-retired ace reporter like Grimm to do your heavy lifting. Get snooping.
It isn’t exactly a deep dive. Just spend an afternoon strolling along Collins Avenue. Look for Slavic men with open collars, gold chains and rolls of cash at any of the Sunny Isles cafes. Your first clue: They won’t speak Spanish.
Looking forward to Fred Grimm’s next essay.
Stuart Goldberg, Parkland
Stop the pollsters
Besides the obvious financial benefits to polling companies who sample a minute number of consumers and then sell findings to an interested entity, what is the true purpose of polls as they relate to elections?
Could it be to influence or skew voters’ thinking over a long lead-up time, so that voter response at the ballot box is a response to what everyone else is doing rather than an informed choice based on research and facts? Regardless of sampling criteria, pollsters come nowhere near querying 100% of the potential audience. Even the biggest poll of all, the election itself, doesn’t come close to indicating the opinion of 100% of eligible voters.
Especially today, with so much fake everything, polls are just as subject to falsehood as a tabloid story about a movie star. Exit polls published before an election is over are equally dangerous to election integrity. Let pollsters ask about detergent and toothpaste as long as anyone pays them. But ban them forever from involvement in influencing any American election.
Susan Breece, Boca Raton