Monday’s front-page New York Times story — headlined “Politics Fuels Surge in Calls For Book Bans” — did liberal Democrats a favor, posing them in their flattering former costumes of fierce free-speech advocates. Meanwhile, today’s actual left-wing is a hive of free-speech squelchers book banners, including the Times’ own reporters, who have an unseemly and anti-journalistic eagerness to “deplatform” voices they don’t like…when they’re conservative “bigots.”
The story by reporters Elizabeth Harris and Alexandra Alter began: “In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like Sex Is a Funny Word and This Book is Gay.
The story employed a common tactic, avoiding passages from and promotions of controversial books. Sex Is a Funny Word is touted as “A comic book for kids that includes children and families of all makeups, orientations, and gender identities, Sex Is a Funny Word is an essential resource about bodies, gender, and sexuality for children ages 8 to 10 as well as their parents and caregivers.” It’s touted as “the first sex education book for this age group thatIs inclusive of lesbian, gay, and bisexual experience as well as Gender-conforming and gender-creative children.”
Unpopular decisions by Tennessee schools boards to eliminate the book from their curriculum are the catalyst of this story MausThe graphic novel ‘The Holocaust as Cats and Jews as Mice is striking.
At a rate never seen before, parents, educators, and school board members are challenging the books in a way that is unprecedented. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.….
Such challenges have long been a staple of school board meetings, but it isn’t just their frequency that has changed, according to educators, Librarians It is not only the advocates of free speech, but also the techniques behind them and the locations where they take place. Social media has fueled the rise of conservative groups, which are pushing for challenges to statehouses and law enforcement.
Harris and Alter both admitted to deepening the truth of the story.
Book challenges aren’t just coming from the right: The Difference Between Men and Mice and To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, have been challenged over the years for how they address race, both were among the library association’s 10 most-challenged books in 2020.
The left’s urge to squelch opposing views goes much deeper than two books. Besides the daily double standards of restrictions on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, Amazon.com pulled a book on transgender issues from its online shelf, and Netflix tried to cancel comedian Dave Chappelle for offensive jokes about transgenders.
However, social media companies pridefully censor the content New York Post’s expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election, while the privacy-loving Times desired access to private conversations online and suggested free speech threatens democracy by giving conservatives a voice.
The paper even tooted its own horn as if it were a victim of censorship as well.
Others instances see more drastic attempts to ban books, with parents or organizations attempting to take them out of libraries and cut off all access. No book was targeted harder than this one. The 1619 Project a best-seller about slavery in America that has drawn wide support among many historians and Black leaders and which arose from the 2019 special issue of The New York Times Magazine.In the proposed legislation, it has been explicitly named.
The Times showed its contempt for free speech when a “child mob” at the paper forced the resignation of then-opinion editor James Bennet for having the audacity to publish an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton calling for deploying the military to quell rioting in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
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