While checking out the “banned and challenged” display at my local Barnes & Noble recently, I was reminded that the entire kerfuffle is a giant racket. For publishers and booksellers, “banned” books are likely a money-making racket. Virtually every allegedly “banned” book on the display table is already a massive (sometimes generational) bestseller. Not that this reality stops authors like Jodi Picoult, whose books dot virtually every bookstore in the country, from running around pretending their novels are “banned” because a sliver of taxpayers are no longer on the hook to buy them.
For the left, the banned book claim is a political racket, allowing them to feign indignation over the alleged “authoritarianism” of Republicans who don’t want kids reading identitarian pseudohistories or books depicting oral sex, rape, violence, or gender dysphoria in their schools.
Yet, major media now regularly contend, as indisputable fact, that “book bans” are in place. The claim is embedded in the Democrat’s daily rhetoric. After the mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, we were not plunged into another inane discussion about “stochastic terrorism” or political violence, but rather a preposterous comparison of Tennessee’s “book bans” and lax gun control. As Liz Cheney noted, “if we really want to keep our children safe, we need to spend less time banning books and more time stopping the horrific gun violence in our schools.”
Books are banned in Tennessee in the same way a person can’t say the word “gay” in Florida. It’s a myth. Yet,
