Book banners are nothing new

There have always been people ready and willing to ban LGBTQ and Black perspective books, they just now feel emboldened by the arch conservative hysteria spreading through the US

In the 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” Annie Kinsella, played by Amy Madigan, confronts a woman at a local Iowa school board meeting who wants to ban books from the school library.

The two exchange arguments before Kinsella asks if the crowd experienced the sixties. The woman replies saying she lived through the decade before Kinsella replies, “No ma’am, I think you experienced the fifties two times and went right on into the seventies.” The two threaten to get into a physical altercation before the movie flashes to an excited Kinsella in the hallway who boasts of taking down the “Nazi cow.”

Similar scenes of local white people parading before school boards trying to ban books are playing out all over conservative America right now.

The headlines are abundant. Everywhere we look these days there are conservative school boards, legislatures, and mayors getting busy banning books from school libraries and curriculum.

Surprised political observers in major media markets are seemingly shocked that such a development would occur in liberal United States. After years of contrarian dipshit pundits warning of a censorious, authoritarian left, it’s the right, unsurprisingly, that has proven to be significantly worse on that front.

The thing is, right wing activists have always been like this. It shouldn’t be a surprise that petty fiefdoms run by conservatives have moved to seriously curtail the free speech of LGBTQ and Black writers, seeking to stamp out the free exchange of ideas because of bigoted ideals of “traditional values.”

Every few years we go through the same moral panic over and over again. The only thing that makes this time different is that the bigots are feeling emboldened by a rising tide of authoritarian fascism on the right.

I mean, over the weekend there was a Nazi demonstration in Florida. Nazi flags were flown in unsettling numbers at a “trucker rally” against mask and vaccine mandates in Canada. Of course any local homophobe or racist in power will feel comfortable taking action against books they’re offended by.

It’s an unpopular statement to make these days, but the only way to make this stop is to make these people uncomfortable to exercise their power in this way.