Unprecedented effort in 2023 to ban books

I didn’t say that. Your quote came from an article on RFK Jr from NPR. For someone who claims to care a lot about context, you left all of the context out of your quote.

You've really twisted this.  I posted the full article for all of the context.  I disagree, it's a fairly long article and most of it on vaccines and conspiracy theories are not relevant to this thread.

Here's what I posted and the bolded is the part you quoted

Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his campaign challenging President Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, he has given hours of interviews to podcasts, magazines and TV networks. He paints a dark, conspiratorial picture of the world, bristling with debunked theories, misleading claims and outright falsehoods.

Wi-Fi causes cancer and "leaky brain," Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan last month. Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings, he mused during an appearance with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender, he told right-wing Canadian psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson, echoing a false assertion made by serial fabulist Alex Jones. AIDS may not be caused by HIV, he has suggested multiple times.

There's no credible evidence for any of these assertions or for Kennedy's longest-running false claims: that vaccines cause autism and are more harmful than the diseases they're designed to protect against.

Yet Kennedy is building a campaign for the highest office around these conspiracy theories and the idea that fact-checking or criticizing them amounts to censorship. His throughline is the bedrock conspiratorial premise that "they" (the government, pharmaceutical companies, the media) are lying to you — but that he is telling the truth.



This is Kennedy's narrative, not mine, and I do not agree with his assertion that fact checking or criticizing his conspiracy theories is censorship.  Your point that no one is saying this is false, this is what RFK is claiming.

the idea that fact-checking or criticizing them amounts to censorship.





And here are the last 2 paragraphs that I do in fact agree with

What's not up for debate for scientists, researchers and public health officials is Kennedy's long track record of undermining science and spreading dubious claims.

"He has an enormous platform. He is going to, over the next many months, do a series of town hall meetings where he will continue to put bad information out there that will cause people to make bad decisions for themselves and their families, again putting children at risk and causing children to suffer," Offit said. "Because it's always the most vulnerable among us who suffer our ignorance."



Moving on because this discussion of RFK nothing to do with book banning.

Republicans have waged war not just on books, but also librarians and educators.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/02/19/maryland-bill-book-challenges-libraries/

We now have to pass laws to protect freedoms we thought we had
The “Freedom to Read Act” of Maryland is proposed to protects books and librarians

One of the most disquieting pieces of legislation hit the Maryland General Assembly last month.
It’s House Bill 785 — the Freedom to Read Act.

“A library should not exclude material from its catalogue because of the origin, background or views of a person who created the material,” it says.

“A library should not prohibit or remove material from its catalogue because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

And the gut punch is about the librarians themselves. They shall not be “dismissed, demoted, suspended, disciplined, reassigned, transferred or otherwise retaliated against,” the bill states.

This part is urgent.

“I have had library workers come to me and say, ‘I’m scared to recommend books to young people,’” said Tiffany Sutherland, president of the Maryland Library Association and a librarian in Calvert County. Her co-workers feel under siege and beleaguered.

Half of challenged books return to schools. LGBTQ books are banned most.

Texas and Florida have been the epicenters of America’s recent book banning movement. But the book challenges, the retaliation against librarians, the chill of educational discourse is also a concern in blue Maryland.

“This is something you saw on the national news,” said Maryland Del. Dana Jones (D-Anne Arundel), who introduced the bill in January. “But it’s happening here, too.”

A similar federal bill — the Fight Book Bans Act — was introduced in the U.S. House in December. Meanwhile, last year Illinois became the first state to pass a law penalizing libraries that ban books. New Jersey was considering one.
The bill in Maryland would be a sweeping and pioneering stand against a trend right out of Europe’s totalitarian age or any of the science fiction books my kids read (when they were still able to get them in the library).

In the 2022-23 school year, there were 3,362 instances of books being banned from public school classrooms and libraries, according to Pen America. The organization’s tally includes instances “where students’ access to books in school libraries and classrooms in the United States was restricted or diminished, for either limited or indefinite periods of time.”

It’s the volume of attacks that is new in our era.
Sutherland said that in her 14 years as a librarian, she could previously think of only two instances of book challenges.

“Now, it’s a constant barrage of questioning our collection, questioning our profession, questioning what we’re doing, what our intentions are,” Sutherland said.

We can thank the Moms for Liberty — a name as oxymoronic as “down escalator” — for helping to fuel this assault on a freedom we all thought was part of life in the United States.

They have a playbook: finding passages in books that make them clutch their pearls, submitting objections to libraries, then heading to school board meetings.

There, they read graphic passages, fanning themselves or rolling their eyes. At a Carroll County, Md., school board meeting last fall, they described garments falling to the ground, “secret sweetness” and rape, apologizing to the audience — which usually include the students they’re allegedly protecting.

The campaign was successful in Carroll County — getting more than 50 books removed, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Water for Elephants.”

Now they’re heading to the Howard County school board with their lists. It must be exhausting to read all those books and demand that a school bans them, right?

“When we see the challenge forms,” Jones, the legislator, said, “there’s a box that asks: ‘Have you read this book that you’re challenging?’ And more times than not, it’s ‘No, I haven’t read the book.’”

Turns out, the Moms for Liberty website links to a cheat code, BookLooks.org, the lazy conservatives’ highlight reel of out-of-context, lurid, violent, provocative or controversial passages of books — no deep reading necessary. Easier for kids to find, too.

While book banners are slamming school boards and librarians with piles of paperwork and appeals, there are other tactics that have remained under the radar.

Sometimes, the objectors just take the book they want to get rid of and walk out with it. Sutherland said she sees that often.

Jones said she’s heard from libraries that put out a display of books for Pride Month and someone comes in, checks them all out, then returns them in July.

“It happens with Black history month, too,” she said. “That’s not okay.”

The fine for deliberately walking out with or destroying a book used to be $250. Jones’ bill raises it to $1,000 and a possible three-month jail sentence all to say to the book banners, “we see you and we know what you’re doing,” she said.

The fact is, you can’t have it both ways, book banners. You can’t claim freedom and liberty and then decide what books other people can read. You can’t object to the government, then ask the government to do your parenting for you by banning the books you don’t want your kids to read.

“It’s your choice to leave that book on the shelf,” Jones said. “If it’s not right for you, if it’s not right for your family, nobody’s telling you to check it out.”

people.com/sheila-nevins-on-her-oscar-nominated-documentary-on-book-bans-exclusive-8580634

A new film is taking the book banning controversy all the way to the Oscars.

The ABCs of Book Banning, a new documentary by acclaimed producer and director Sheila Nevins, is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film. The film examines the impact of book banning on students, told from their perspective.

“Children care a lot about what they read because they can't get on a plane and they can't look at the world except through books,” Nevins, 84, tells PEOPLE. “And so books are their sight. Books are the way they see what's out there, what was, what is, what will become.”

Nevins, who recently announced her departure as head of MTV Documentary Films, and who previously served as president of HBO Documentary Films and Family Programming, currently holds 26 Academy Awards for her work in film — The ABCs of Book Banning is her first nomination as director. Trish Adlesic and Nazenet Habtezghi also directed the film.

Book censorship has rapidly increased in recent years, and has become a nationwide debate. According to preliminary data found by the American Library Association, 3,923 titles were challenged between January 1, 2023 and August 31, 2023.

PEN America reports that some of the most-banned titles during the 2022-2023 school year included The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. Many books that are challenged discuss race, LGBTQ issues and history.

Nevins says that she was first inspired to make the documentary after coming across one standout advocate: 101-year-old Grace Linn, who appears in the documentary to speak out against book banning before a school board in Martin County, Florida.

“She was talking about this disgrace of banning books in that particular school district,” Nevins says. “I really didn't know very much about book banning, but she inspired me to look into it. Then, I thought, ‘We have to make this film.’”

While book censorship discussions often put parents and educators in the spotlight, Nevins decided to center the documentary on the children directly impacted, told in their own voices.

“We didn't want it to appear as a children's film, which it certainly is not,” she says. “But the stars of it are really the children and their books.”

The documentary includes interviews with Florida students, ranging in age from elementary to high school. The film also shows the covers of restricted, challenged and banned books that the students are reading, along with quoted passages from the books themselves.

“We were astounded to find the kind of books that were banned for children,” Nevins says. “Everything from [And Tango Makes Three] to the graphic [novelization of] Anne Frank. The span of censure was quite extraordinary. And the censorship in general was overwhelming.”

Working on the film also gave Nevins an opportunity to reflect on her own experience as a reader.

“I realized what a big part books had played in my life, and that I really formed a lot of what I loved and thought about the world from the books that I read,” she says. “And to think that young children were going to be deprived [of] that; it scared me.”

Amidst the growing number of attempts to censor books around the country, Nevins hopes that The ABCs of Book Banning will highlight young people's right to “expand their horizons.”

“It's a tough world that children are growing up in now. It's a world with war. It's a world where the planet is in danger,” she says. “I would want them to be informed about the world they live in so that they can make it a safer and better place.”

"It's not just adults—kids are speaking up about how books [on the banned lists] helped them," says Calzada. The pair believe most people value libraries and disagree with book banning. "We're at an unprecedented moment. We had no idea censorship would get this bad—I hope we inspire others to get involved," says Foote.

It's regrettable that any Moms of Liberty candidates were elected, but I hope efforts to run against them are successful




Moms of Liberty