Banned Books Nonsense

It's all marketing

Every year around this time, the American Library Association (ALA) and its hangers-on proclaim “Banned Books Week,” creating displays and ad campaigns showcasing those dangerous books that have been banned by stodgy conservatives throughout the nation. Like most things the ALA does these days, it’s all about performative propaganda in service of the leftist revolution.

Usually when the ALA or another leftist group talks about supposedly banned books, they present classics such as Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, or To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This table at a bookstore from 2020 demonstrates this perspective:

However, if you visit the ALA’s “Banned and Challenged Books” website and click on their top ten most challenged books of 2023, you’ll see that they all have something in common:

1. Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

2. All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

3. This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson

4. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

5. Flamer by Mike Curato

6. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

7. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

8. Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

9. Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan

10. Sold by Patricia McCormick

The ALA would have you believe that troglodyte conservatives are challenging books throughout America because they are threatened by dangerous ideas such as tolerance and diversity, but a look at the ten books above shows that every single one contains graphic depictions of sex and sexuality, and even rape.

The question is not why do some community libraries and school boards choose to challenge these books; rather why are the ALA and other leftist organizations so intent on putting these in the hands of your children?

Of course, the ALA’s claim that these are banned books is ridiculous on its face. Each of those books is available on Amazon, often with same-day shipping, or even instantaneously if you buy the Kindle version. Most brick and mortar bookstores throughout the country will have copies of these books, as do most public libraries. It really is an incredible feat of disingenuous wordplay to claim that a pile of books on a table in front of the store have been banned.

If a book was truly banned in America, it would be difficult, if not impossible to find a copy. Consider Camp of the Saints, a 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail about a hypothetical future in which Europe is overrun by third-world immigrants. (Crazy, huh? As if that would ever happen!)

Finding a physical copy of this book is very difficult. The Lynx Library Consortium, a network of public libraries in the Treasure Valley, does not have a copy. (It does have a copy of a 1994 LDS western novel by the same name.) Barnes and Noble doesn’t carry the book, and the only copies on Amazon are sold by private parties which (as of this writing) start at $118 for paperbacks and $2,507.99 for hardcovers.

Amazon shows one ebook available, but according to reviewers it is extremely sloppy and shoddy, as if someone haphazardly scanned pages into a digital copy.

Camp of the Saints is one of the more popular dissident books, but there are dozens, even hundreds more that have simply been disappeared from society.

Maybe right now you’re thinking that this is a good thing, because books like this have dangerous ideas. Isn’t that the very argument made by groups such as the ALA for their so-called banned books? Yet the most challenged book of 2023, Gender Queer, is available on Amazon starting at $21.57 for paperback and $12.99 for Kindle. It is also available through the Lynx Library Consortium, and is as of this writing on the shelf at the Bown Crossing Branch of the Boise Library.

In 2020, Abigail Shrier wrote a book called Irreversible Damage which looked at how transgenderism had become a social contagion among vulnerable teen and preteen girls. The LGBTQ+ community was outraged and demanded the book be banned. Target initially caved to the pressure and took the book off its shelves before restoring it after negative press. According to Shrier, the ACLU’s “deputy director for transgender justice” Chase Strangio demanded the book be stopped by any means necessary:

Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans. I think of all the times & ways I was told my transness wasn’t real & the daily toll it takes. We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again… Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.

The American left is not against banning books per se, rather they want to have their cake and eat it too by banning books they consider dangerous while shoving in our faces books they think are dangerous to us, that is, to Americans holding traditional values. “Banned Books Week” is a marketing platform, a propaganda blitz designed for you to identify with them as the perpetual victims of an intolerant conservative society. Yet reality is the opposite — a book that challenges the left wing orthodoxy is much more likely to be truly banned than anything that supports it.

Thanks to Kathy Twitchell for her post this week that inspired me to write about this issue.

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