Walk into a bookstore anywhere in the country. Chances are that, somewhere toward the front, you’ll see a glossy display table labeled “Banned Books.” The same is true for public libraries, which give “banned books” the prominent treatment once reserved for new and noteworthy releases. At Nordstrom, they sell a “Read Banned Books” canvas tote for $43.
Why the sudden rush to advertise the claim that books are being widely banned in America? Listen to our literati, and you’ll hear a grim story: During the previous school year, the fine folks at PEN America recently informed their followers, no fewer than 6,870 book bans were imposed across the nation, or roughly eighteen bans per day. We’re in the midst of an inquisition, the organization warns, that targets mainly “books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women,” as well as books about “racism, sexuality, gender, history.”
Pass the smelling salts! If this claim—advanced by our nation’s premier guardian of literary freedom—is true, then we’re living in a hellscape of bigotry and ignorance, with our town squares just one bonfire away from resembling Berlin’s Opernplatz in 1933.
I have some good news: “Banned books” are a big, fat, dumb hoax.
Responding to PEN America’s drummed-up hysteria, researchers at the Heritage Foundation set out in 2023 to test the claim, armed with a simple methodology: They printed out PEN’s list of allegedly banned books, logged on to the library catalogs in the school districts where these books were supposedly being banned, and tried to see how hard it would be, in reality, for anyone to procure the contraband.
The results should not surprise you. For example, The Hate U Give is young-adult agitprop shlock about police brutality and systemic racism and other Black Lives Matter talking points. It is one of the books PEN advertises as most frequently banned. According to the organization, the novel was removed from the shelves of public schools in Goddard, Kansas. Yet the Heritage researchers logged on to the district’s website and soon learned that the book was so completely suppressed that no fewer than nine copies of it were available in circulation, including three that were checked out at the time of the investigation. PEN judged the Indian River School District in Florida, another of its favorite targets, even more harshly for banning The Hate U Give. Yet in the district’s library catalog, twenty copies were available. The researchers reported similar findings for 74 percent of the books PEN and others alleged were being targeted by big, bad banning campaigns.
Why make so much noise about something that isn’t happening? To answer this important question, we need look no further than the lists of allegedly banned books, which PEN and other organizations publish each year. Routinely, these lists include timeless classics like The Diary of Anne Frank or Jack London’s The Call of the Wild that have been singled out by some concerned school board member somewhere who disliked Frank’s candid discussion of sexuality or London’s penchant for socialism. But these examples are distractions because, for the most part, the lists of “banned books” feature the same repeating roster of offending titles.
One is Gender Queer, a graphic novel by Maia Kobabe. It’s PornHub for the alternative teen set, complete with graphic illustrations of oral sex. Another is All Boys Aren’t Blue, a self-described “memoir-manifesto” by George M. Johnson, which features more than a few wildly explicit scenes depicting gay sex between two minors. And, for those who like their stuff a little less X-rated, there’s Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which argues cheerfully that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
Would you like your children—or anyone’s children, for that matter—to feed on morally and intellectually rotten fare of this sort? And would you feel comfortable knowing that their school’s library, as a recent exposé by the Free Press revealed, is very likely to shelve Kendi and Karl Marx but not at all likely to offer Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, John McWhorter, or any book that does not toe the radical progressive party line?
If the answer is “no,” and if you believe you have the right—as a parent or a taxpayer—to say which books belong in your community’s schools, mazal tov: You’re now one of those benighted, know-nothing book banners our self-appointed moral and intellectual elites love to cackle over.
How can we combat this rampant and ruinous Maoism and its evident ambition to spur a cultural revolution? Here’s a modest proposal: We should do precisely what we’re falsely accused of and get on with the salutary task of banning books. En masse. With gusto.
Does this shock you? It shocks me, too: I’ve dedicated my life to the sacred work of reading and writing books, a calling that confers upon those foolish enough to answer it penury and the opposite of fame. Traveling to bookstores to give talks to an audience of four; begging acquaintances to mention the latest release on their podcasts; working for years only to have your book drop the same week as some celebrity divorce and slip into oblivion: That’s the life of an author. These are the indignities that only those of us with supreme faith in the healing power of books can withstand.
And it’s precisely this faith in the power of the written word that ought to inspire true book lovers like us to rise to their defense. Bad books drive out good ones, which means if we care about transmitting a healthy, critical, and capacious culture of reading to our children, we need to ban bad books from school libraries. If we don’t, books themselves will become meaningless, and the next generation will come to regard the written word as just another weapon in the ever-swelling arsenal of our culture wars—which is exactly how the Maoist school librarians see them.
The offensive currently mounted by publishers, PEN America, the ACLU, and just about everyone else in the corporate–nonprofit industrial complex is a dangerous one. Put crassly, the strategy is this: Publish some vile bit of smut, hail it as culturally important and virtuous (or progressive—the words are treated as synonyms), wait for some Midwestern mom to find it in her daughter’s book bag and get upset, and then argue that parents who believe they have the right to choose their kids’ books are mirthless Mussolinis. It’s a gambit for power, and the only possible outcome is shattered trust in publishing houses, libraries, and other institutions vital to a strong civic society.
This cynical approach is already so widespread and propulsive that it’s going to take equal or greater force to stop it. If we want books to matter again, we must state plainly that it’s precisely because we cherish them that we refuse to let pornographic propaganda masquerade as literature in our classrooms and curricula.
It is true that you needn’t reach too far back to recall masterpieces described as useless smut. See: Ulysses. But the tables, we should realize, have since turned. Now it’s the publishers and the critics who are the censors, arguing not for their right to contribute to the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas but for the privilege of singlehandedly determining who gets to read what and why. Squawking about freedom of speech is rich coming from an industry that has spent the last decade publishing only its preferred minority groups and only those whose opinions it sanctions.
If we are to survive this onslaught, we must counter the duplicitous “book banning” narrative with a much stronger one that argues for the right of Americans to ensure that their children are nourished by a much more wholesome and nutritious intellectual diet.
The courts, hallelujah, seem to agree. For example, when Iowa exercised its right to remove certain books from its schools’ shelves after deeming them entirely inappropriate for young children, the state was sued by a murderers’ row of plaintiffs, including publishers like Random House and best-selling authors like Jodi Picoult, who all characterized the move as a violation of free speech. (By this reasoning, if school districts don’t buy your book, you’re being denied your constitutional rights.) A lower court blocked the law last year, but, this spring, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed the injunction. A Florida court issued a similar ruling in a case last fall: A school library, ruled Judge Allen Winsor of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, is an educational platform, not a public forum for the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. And those students who want to read the so-called banned books, the judge went on, can easily buy the books and read them to their hearts’ content. It’s not as though any official in Florida were blocking Amazon deliveries, although, as we know, Amazon refuses to sell certain disfavored books, which are always conservative and never progressive.
These victories should cheer us up and spur us on. Let’s keep the barbarians from having complete control over our public bookshelves. That imperative isn’t censorship—it’s simply a duty we have to future generations of readers.