Censorship News

 First, Fahrenheit 2022: A Spasm of Book Banning whete Charlie Sykes details book banning in America. Some highlights:

In Florida, state education officials have rejected dozens of math texts because they allegedly include prohibited references to race; bookstores refuse to carry novels by J.K. Rowling; legislatures continue to create lists of prohibited books; and in scenes that would make Mencken’s ghost howl, smut-hunting illiterati across the country have risen up against public libraries.

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 Even the ACLU seemed to break bad on the idea that the book should be available in the marketplace of ideas. Chase Strangio, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy director for transgender justice, tweeted: “Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans. . . . We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again.”

He declared: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

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 But that misses the heart of the current danger: the absence of robust support for the idea that even offensive speech needs protection; that words are not violence; and that sensitivities should not be the basis of censorship.

Illiberal progressives have very different objections than the right-wing critics, but they unfortunately share the premise of the censor: that we need to be protected from dangerous/offensive ideas/books/speech.

Whiney, wimpy Americans calling themselves conservatives are not conserving our freedom.

Secondly, US conservatives linked to rich donors wage campaign to ban books from schools reports

Conservative groups across the US, often linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors, are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.

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 Groups purporting to be “grassroots” efforts have frequently led the charge, petitioning school boards or elected officials to remove certain books. Though some of these organizations present themselves as a local effort that sprang up around groups of parents united behind a cause, many of the groups involved in banning books are in fact linked, and backed by influential conservative donors.

Who benefits from keeping Americans from reading books? What good comes from keeping regular citizens ignorant?

sch 4/26/22