Click each image to enlarge.

0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 227 and I am your co-host, Ben Radford. With me is…

Celestia Ward:  Celestia Ward. Hey Ben, how’s it going?

0:00:35
BR: Doing alright. How’s things there?

0:00:36
CW: Pretty good. Pretty good. I know you’re prepping for your appearance at the Utah Folklore something or other?

0:00:46
BR: Yes. I think you’re referring to the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research.

CW: That one, yes, yes.

0:00:52
BR: Yeah, ISCLR, where I’ll be speaking on the topic, The Political Chupacabra.

CW: I’ve been seeing you’ve been posting a lot of chupacabra cartoons or it looks like mid-1990s cartooning.

BR: It is, and that’s because my particular interest is in the origins of the chupacabra. So you know, these days, of course, it’s been sort of homogenized and commodified, but really my interest is in depictions of the chupacabra from, say, 1995 to about 2000. I know it’s very nerdy, but that’s my groove. So looking at how was the chupacabra depicted and how is it described, where is it thought to come from and things like that. So that’s what I’m talking about.

0:01:49
CW: You were into chupacabras before they were cool.

BR: Thank you.

CW: All right. All right. Well, while you’re doing that, I’ve been preparing for the New Mexico Skepticamp.

BR: I’ve heard about that.

CW: Listeners, have you heard of the New Mexico SkeptiCamp coming up? If you’ve been within earshot of Susan Gerbic, you may have heard about it. Yes, the first ever SkeptiCamp NM or SkeptiCamp New Mexico. You can find information about it at SkeptiCampNM.com. It’s going to be held June 1st and 2nd. So that’s just coming up in a couple of weeks then.

0:02:25
BR: It is. You’ll be there, I’ll be there. We will have, I think, Pascual is likely to be there. We will have The Credible Hulk, we’ll have Susan, all sorts of cool people, Kurly Tlapoyawa, Larry Barker, local news reporter, and others as well.

0:02:41
CW: Yes, Adrian Hill, Brian Dunning is going to be bringing out his UFO movie.

0:02:48
BR: You invited Brian?

0:02:49
CW: I thought you invited him.

0:02:50
BR: I thought you invited him.

CW: How did he get invited? Oh, well, I guess we got to have him now.

BR: We love you, Brian. So plenty of skeptics and plenty of fun stuff. It’s pretty much just a free-for-all. There is no registration fee. You just show up.

CW: You just how up. You don’t even need to register. You just show the hell up. So we’ll be doing a few things for donations, but it is just skeptic camp and camp is fun. There won’t be s’mores, there will likely be craft brews instead. Friday night there’s gonna be sort of a meet and greet at an as yet unchosen pub. And then we’re gonna have Saturday and Sunday with speakers, June 1st and 2nd. Check out the website at skepticampnm.com and follow along.

BR: Yeah, if you’re in New Mexico or you more might be able to stop in for the weekend, we’d love to see you and meet you.

0:03:43
CW: Yeah. Now this week, we’ve got a big topic about book bans and we try not to get too political. But, you know, as we’re heading into an election season, we have kind of looked at a couple of topics that could benefit from a skeptical magnifying glass to parse out a few things that aren’t necessarily political, but are being used by political factions. And so yeah, book bans are definitely one of those. John Oliver kind of scooped us, that smarmy Brit, but he’s really funny so he’s definitely different than our podcast.

BR: There you go.

CW: And before we get into our main topic I did want to sort of throw out some props to the SGU crew, Skeptics Guide to the Universe, revisited the topic of Havana Syndrome because they had sort of done a, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, there’s definitely possibility it’s true. You know, it’s an actual thing that’s affecting people neurologically. And I listened to that several weeks ago, and I was like, huh, and then they didn’t have any points that Bob Bartholomew made. And it seemed to be a noticeable omission, from my point of view, since we’ve had Bob on the show, and he seems to be the expert you want to talk to about this. And they had him on the show. So they had Bob Bartholomew on talk for quite a while, laid out a lot of the the evidence that does seem like he made a great case that resonated with the SGU guys.

0:05:05
BR: Good. I’m glad. Glad to get on board after we did it.

0:05:08
CW: Well, sometimes we’re scooped. Sometimes we scoop others. It’s really a zero sum game as long as everybody’s learning. Speaking of learning, our topic, banned books.

(MUSIC)

CW: So our topic today is going to be book bans and burning books and just generally trying to quash information in book form. I know you’ve got feelings on this.

0:05:47
BR: Yes, I’m against it, just in principle. Yeah, in fact, here in my hometown, about maybe six months or so ago, there was a group that was trying to institute some book bans and I attended the local meeting. I was one of a handful of people who were fighting against it and it was interesting because you could tell the people that were in favor of the bans, they were all on the same page and there’s a woman that sat directly in front of me and she had what was obviously copy and pasted notes, sort of bullet points, you know.

0:06:23
CW: I know the groups that are going after these books generally seem to be all the people who in school were just copying off each other left and right and didn’t learn anything in the first place.

0:06:34
BR: Yeah, and it was interesting, I won’t go into the whole thing, but it was, you know, it was interesting sort of hearing the topics that they sort of sidestepped. What exactly are you concerned about? And, you know, and we, well, it just sort of, you know, influences on children and like, well, it’s interesting because all the ones you’ve listed here are ones that involve minorities and LGBTQ. Well, that’s sort of coincidental. Is it? Is it really? Because there were a lot of parents who got up and spoke and teachers as well. And so I didn’t want to sort of just repeat what everybody else said. And so I said, speaking as an author, and I think as far as I know, I was the only actual author who was there at this meeting. I said, you know, you only had like a minute and a half just to talk. Everybody had to be pretty concise. I said, look, you know, one of my books is effectively banned in a Santa Fe bookstore. It’s my book, Mysterious New Mexico.

0:07:29
CW: Really?

BR: Yeah, but it is not carried there. And the reason is that the bookstore owner found the cover of that book offensive.

0:07:37
CW: It is creepy AF.

0:07:40
BR: It is creepy, yes. And what I said is, I said, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. Here’s the thing. That is a private bookstore. She, the store owner, can carry whatever book she wants. I don’t have a problem with that. The issue is, if it’s a public library, I do have a serious problem with people deciding for others what they can read. And I got a smattering of applause for that point. But anyway.

0:08:04
CW: Yeah. And that, you know, we should bring up now since we’re we’ve already unloaded our our I wouldn’t call it a bias that this is our position on book banning. Again, we’re against it. Skeptics out there who are wondering, hey, you know, I want to do some skeptical activism. What can I do? Attending your library board meetings is a great idea. If there are going to be some sort of protests or activism or legislation or any sort of public meeting that involves people bringing copied and pasted notes to try and get a handful of books banned, it’s a good idea to have some people in opposition to that who make themselves known.

BR: Yeah and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that the local council apparently had anticipated this and the whole meeting was prefaced by a fairly detailed and pretty well rendered 15 or 20-minute presentation by the village attorney who said, these are the rules, this is what we allow in the libraries and this is why. And he laid it out very clearly and it was interesting because I could see, again, I could read the bullet points on the clipboard in the lady in front of me, and they were directly addressing her points. So I could sort of see her slightly wilt when she realized that they had anticipated their complaint. And actually, if you follow the law, then actually there was no merit to it. So, and in general, the counselors did not seem inclined to give much much credence and the guy that spoke directly before me sort of sabotaged his credibility by talking about how terrible it is all these all these dangerous books and usually they admitted they actually hadn’t read them.

CW: Yeah, that’s the problem.

BR: He said and then on the way out he sort of stamped his foot and said, Satanists! Okay, all right, sit down sir.

CW: Yeah, well speaking of Satan, looking at this under a skeptical lens, we do have a few angles we’re going to be pulling out here. The current bans, the current efforts at banning books can be thought of as resulting from a panic. And panics have roots. They have social context. They have things that play into them. And then there’s also this weird whiplash thing where I’m also seeing some parties frame the current concerns about book bans as a panic like I don’t know if you’ve spent much time on Ron DeSantis’s website In Florida.

BR: I have not I have not.

CW: He’s got a whole uh quote-unquote debunking of the book ban myth uh, you know claiming that the left is just making it sound like there’s empty bookshelves in Florida and that’s ridiculous. We have all these titles and he literally put photographs of bookshelves that contain books as a debunking of…

0:11:02
BR: There you go, skeptics, photos of books.

0:11:06
CW: And I don’t think anybody’s saying that, you know, the bookshelves are empty in a literal sense, just that, you know, you’re taking away all these voices, you’re clearly targeting certain things, and you’re just being a dick about things, golly. So, but we’re going to get more into that. We should probably begin at the beginning, which would be the history of book bands. When did this idea start? And it pretty much started with books.

BR: Yeah, I mean, anytime you have something that’s written or, you know, knowledge that can be communicated without the speaker being present. Obviously in written form that’s when you have people, you know, anything that’s printed somebody may object to and probably somebody will object to.

CW: Yeah, I don’t have any information on cave people furiously sanding away cave paintings, but I’m sure it happened, but the starting point I picked was the burning of the Library of Alexandria. We’ve all heard of that.

BR: Yes, I haven’t been there, but I didn’t I didn’t I was away when that happened.

CW: Not not not Alexandria, Virginia. I have been there. But, you know, around the third or fourth century A.D., there was a strife between Christians, Jews and pagans and Caesar.

0:12:26
BR: What? Strife?

0:12:27
CW: Yes, there was historical strife between many peoples in the area. And of course, we’ve all heard of the killing of Hypatia, which was generally attributed to the Christians of the time. And then a few hundred years later, in 640 AD, apparently the Muslims took the city of Alexandria. And I will pull a quote I found from one historian here. “Upon learning of a great library containing all the knowledge of the world, the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions. The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the library’s holdings, they will either contradict the Quran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous. Burn it all down.” So that’s that’s that kind of encapsulates a very simplified version of why people like to burn and ban books. Or in that case, it was a lot of scrolls. But details about this Muslim book burner in Alexandria weren’t really written down until 300 years later. So everything’s a little fuzzy, you know. When libraries down, that actually does make history even more fuzzy. So we really shouldn’t be doing that. Moving quickly forward, in Germany, you think, you think I’m going to start with the Nazi book burnings, don’t you?

0:13:50
BR: That would be my guess, but knowing you, you probably, you probably have some side angle into it.

0:13:55
CW: You would be wrong. No, actually a hundred years before the Nazi book burnings, 120 years before. In 1817, there was what many considered to be a precursor to the Nazi book burnings. German student associations were trying to demonstrate a unified Germany. At the time, Germany was still kind of a patchwork quilt of different, you know, territories. And so these students got together and started burning anything that could be seen as anti-national or un-German. And it was specifically held on the 300th anniversary of when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. So that happened in 1817. And then a few generations later, we have the Nazi book burnings, which began around 1933, again, led by student groups. And they got organized, you know, poking through some sources about the Nazi book learnings. It is hard to not see some similarities in the way that parent groups are organizing themselves today. They created blacklists of books. They targeted works by certain people, Jewish scholars, political figures. Ernest Hemingway got thrown into the bunch there too. They were real serious. They didn’t just show up at board meetings. They raided bookstores, libraries, publishers’ warehouses. They confiscated anything that was un-German material. And all this did make the world news, and it was seen at that time as barbaric and backward. So if nothing else, the fact that the light was being shed on book burning helped identify the Nazi movement as a real bad thing that people soon found out they were doing the same thing to human beings they were doing to books. So yeah, chilling but there you have it. That’s a well-known book burning instance to be the Nazi party.

0:15:58
BR: Well, I was digging into a couple of examples here in the United States, or in one case, the pre-United States. And before we go further, we should be clear that even though we’re doing an episode on book burning and book bans, we are only scratching the surface. In many cases, the Western civilization and not other languages, and so it’s a huge complex topic that, you know, with that caveat, we’re not giving anything, we’re just sort of hitting on some highlights here. There was a case that I was researching in Massachusetts in 1628. There was a man named Thomas Morton. He was in the New England area and he began trading with the Indians in Plymouth Colony, which was not in and of itself necessarily a problem because trading with Indians sometimes even though they were hostile, you had to trade with them and that was fairly—

0:16:48
CW: I believe it saved many people from starvation and death.

0:16:52
BR: Right, it was a thing. But unfortunately for Morton, he actually pissed off others in his colony because the concern was that he was not only trading with them, you know, pelts and things like that, but that he was actually teaching them how to repair weapons, make bullets, and gave them written information how to make gunpowder.

0:17:15
CW: Oh, written information like not necessarily in the form of a book, but yeah, but yeah, so pamphlet or something.

0:17:23
BR: Yeah, yeah, pamphlet. And so this is where they’re like, well, hold on here. It’s one thing to trade some pelts or food or something like that. But at the point in which, you know, the concern is that there may be arms that could be used against them and things like that. That was a big deal. And again, that was in 1628. Skipping ahead 120 years or so, in 1740, Samuel Richardson published a anonymous book titled Pamela or Virtue Rewarded.

0:17:53
CW: Oh, that doesn’t sound like it’s about gunpowder.

0:17:56
BR: No, no, no, no.

0:17:57
CW: More like boudoir powder.

0:18:00
BR: Well, yes, indeed, right? Virtue rewarded. So in Richardson’s story, Pamela Andrews, a poor but virtuous servant girl, was in a wealthy household, and in the process of working there, she faced various moral and physical trials following the death of the mistress of the house. Ethical quandaries, you know, she wants something, but should she steal it? Things like that. And most lasciviously, the young master of the house making advances on her through seduction and later through attempted rape.

0:18:32
CW: This was a tale of ribaldry.

0:18:34
BR: Yes, ribaldry. Yes, sort of the 1740s version of sort of the corseted, what am I looking for?

0:18:42
CW: The bodice rippers?

BR: Bodice rippers, yes. struggled to maintain her virtue and virginity and was successful in doing so and was rewarded with what was ultimately the best thing you could give to a woman, an offer of marriage.

0:19:00
CW: And people had problems with this because…

0:19:02
BR: Well, there’s a couple of things going on here. So it was actually interesting because it was not one story. It was, if you know something about some of the early stories, for example, the Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, were published in installments in newspapers, Conan Doyle. So it was fairly common for ways to hook readers. There’d be the installments and then it wasn’t just one sort of published book, it was a series of them. Because it was published anonymously, it was portrayed as the old, based on a true story.

CW: Oh, which was in effect even back then, of course.

BR: Even back then, you think the latest bogus, you know, horror film, Amityville, you know, Exorcist is based on a true story. They had you beat by a couple hundred years. They were doing the based on a true story back then.

0:19:54
CW: I don’t know. The whole setup of a young master chasing around a servant girl, trying to take liberties with her. Sounds like it’s an easy true story to base something off of.

0:20:06
BR: I would think so.

0:20:08
CW: I’d put my money on that actually having happened a number of times.

0:20:11
BR: But not written by a young man named Richardson.

CW: Okay.

BR: So as you might imagine, this was enormously popular. People, men and women, loved these stories. Again, sort of framed as this really happened. You can sort of imagine a version of the Hollywood Madam story. You know, there’s various anonymous stories of what goes on behind closed doors among the rich and the elite and things like that. And one year after this began being published, in 1741, there was a pamphlet, a sort of a counter pamphlet, circulated calling for it to be censored. And they said this series, this Pamela, if she’s a real girl, and of course it wasn’t, it actually reminds me of the story of O, but we can sort that out. The concern was that young men reading the book would be tempted into repeating the seduction stories with real-life women.

0:21:07
CW: Because they wouldn’t have thought of that before.

0:21:10
BR: Right. This is something that hadn’t been like, what? So yes, this is apparently like all these pure innocent people who hadn’t even thought about going after the young servant girl in the house. And of course, we also see these later arguments appearing centuries later in some of the arguments against pornography. You had the phrases, you know, porn is a theory and rape is the practice, the idea being that anybody who watches or enjoys porn is obviously likely to repeat and sort of internalize those things. And we’ll circle back to that later, but that’s one of the common fears among the censors is like it’s not so much the book itself, it’s what influence does it have on people?

0:21:58
CW: Well, moving from ideas of ideas of dangerous lasciviousness. We also have the dangerous idea of abolition, which created some problems for the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It came out in 1852. Now that book became the subject of bans and attacks by activists who thought it might give people this weird new idea that slavery was not a good idea.

0:22:27
BR: Uh oh, can’t have people thinking that.

0:22:29
CW: Yeah, so yeah, there were some violent things that went on about that book. I heard somebody mailed her a cut off ear from an enslaved person. I mean, you’ve had some weird things sent to you, Ben, but luckily never an ear.

0:22:47
BR: Yeah, and let’s not start that.

0:22:48
CW: Yeah. And then in 1953, we had Fahrenheit 451 came out. Kind of have to give that a mention just because it sort of encapsulates everything about book burnings and book bans and leads into something we’ve talked about already on this show. And that is the comic book bans and juvenile literature panic. Thanks to Frederick Wertham and his book, The Seduction of the Innocent, which came out in 1954. Now, the real tight version of this is Wertham was a psychologist. He was seen as an authority and his influence, along with the general post-war panics of what are the kids getting up to, led to congressional hearings and lots of bans and a really tight comics code. And for more on that, you can see our episode 165, Moral Panic Series Part 4, Literature and Comic Danger.

0:23:45
BR: If I could just add, that whole series we did, I think we did four parts to it, four or five. The whole series was, if I may say so, very good. And what we found was that the Moral Panic theme sort of went through all of them in slightly different versions, depending on who we’re talking about, film or music and things like that. So check out the whole series, but especially part four.

0:24:09
CW: Yes, if this isn’t enough moral panic in book bands, you can always go back to that. Now, moving into, oh, my generation here, the 1980s, Band Book Week was created in 1982, because at that time, there was a surge in the number of challenges that librarians and bookstores and schools were facing. And so, you know, right now, 50 years later, we’re kind of getting a sense of deja vu.

0:24:38
BR: Yeah, I think one of the parts that sometimes is missed is that you had parental groups that they’re charged for a particular agenda. And so it’s not so much that they’re necessarily against, for example, mask mandates or books or even necessarily drag queen story time, for example. But it’s a matter of that there’s a certain subset of politically active people who they’re looking for a reason to react. They’re looking for something to react against, something to make the news, something to prove a point.

0:25:13
CW: They’ve got time on their hands. They’ve got too much damn time on their hands.

0:25:16
BR: They do and that’s one reason why oftentimes, and I don’t want to generalize, but oftentimes when you ask them, if you take them seriously, okay, well, what exactly is the problem? Oftentimes they will admit that they haven’t read the book, they haven’t seen the film, they don’t listen to music. It’s the idea that they’re concerned about. And oftentimes, again, it’s mobilized by special interest groups, and we’ll touch more on that later. But it’s important to frame it in that way because that’s what’s happening. These are not, in most of these cases, these are not organic, genuine concerns by parents who saw something and said, my child shouldn’t be seeing that. And part of it is because, of course, if that happens, and certainly that does happen, that is within the purview of parents, right? If you’re a parent, and you are a parent, and your kid is seeing something you don’t want them to see, you’re seeing it, it’s your job, then take it away. That’s on you.

0:26:16
CW: I take my child’s hand, we walk away from it, and oh look, there’s something shiny over here. Let’s look at this other thing. Yeah, well, the times changed slowly, but they stay the same. And these days, the book bands we are looking at have moved from critical race theory books, which for some reason, legislators had some idea that this was being taught in kindergarten and like grade school. And so it needed to be out of school libraries. And it was not, it was something you would take as an upper level college course. And then-

0:26:48
BR: In law school specifically. That was what’s baffling to me as the critical race theory CRT thing has been in the news for a year and a half and I kept seeing both progressives and conservatives getting it wrong and they’re like, oh well, CRT is being taught in schools. It’s not. I discovered that within about five minutes of Googling. It’s not. It’s literally not being taught in schools.

0:27:16
CW: What is Hyman’s principle is make sure the thing you’re investigating is actually happening.

0:27:22
BR: Right. Yeah. Before before trying to find out why something is going on, make sure it is. But again, it sort of goes back to my point earlier for them. It doesn’t matter that the specific example doesn’t matter. It’s a broader point and of course I I deal with this all the time. We’re pretty on social media, someone will make some point sometimes I even agree with it But they’ll use an example that is flat-out wrong or mostly wrong and I’ll point that out to them.  Often of course, no get pissed at me, but I’m used to that but I’ll say look you mean here I may even agree with you But this is a bad example and it’s making you look bad like you’re uninformed which you are and it’s also providing ammunition to your critics. So just put using as that example.

0:28:08
CW: And that is relevant if everybody who sees the memes, everybody who gets on the bandwagon, everybody who scrolls past it on social media, if everybody actually absorbed things as well and as thoroughly as you, that would be a good point to make. Unfortunately, a great amount of people don’t look into things as deeply. So making a half point or a completely backwards, non-factual point still does curry some political gains, some public opinion gains, and what makes people think, hey, this is a good idea. This is something I should fight for. I found a pretty handy list offered online by the Junior Library Guild, which lists the following psychological reasons behind current book bans. And Ben, I think you would agree, also lying behind previous book bans, and that is, I’ll list them off here, fear of the unknown, desire to protect, you know, the literal, won’t someone think of the children, preservation of societal norms, control of some narrative, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, and preventing perceived harm. Now, all those things are kind of intertwined if you look at it. And I know you’ve got some examples.

BR: Yeah, I mean, and I think that the most important one there, to my mind, is is the perceived harm. And again, we talked about this extensively in the moral panic episodes where there’s this exaggeration of how how influential people think that things are. And typically it’s things they don’t like, right? So if you, if your favorite musician is calling out, you know, some politician that you don’t like, well, that’s great. And this is going to, you know, this is, this is a wonderful thing. And maybe it’s going to, you know, in the case of Taylor Swift, maybe it’s going to change the election and so on. But the real, the real fear that people have is, is influences they don’t like or ones that they think are harmful or going to corrupt children. And again, this is a running theme here and particularly with books. And one thing to keep in mind is that as with, for example, witchcraft accusations, it’s usually the young women who are considered to be most at risk, young women and children, because they were considered to be more easily influenced. They weren’t as strong as us men. They were more likely to be gullibly led into depravity or take your pick.

0:31:07
CW: The weaker sex with the weaker mind. Very childlike. We have to be protected.

BR: Yeah, and it’s obviously patronizing and arguably sexist in many ways. But it’s interesting to sort of look back historically because these days, parents have a hard enough time getting kids to read anything. I mean, they’re stuck on TikTok and Instagram and playing video games. It’s hard to think of a time when parents and teachers are like, oh my God, my kids are reading too much. They’re reading the bad things. They’re going to grow up to be, take your pick.

0:31:41
CW: Yeah. And that fear of, you know, what will this do to women and children? You even see that now. I mean, I see TikToks about, you know, hey, women shouldn’t get this idea that blah, blah, blah. And, you know, there was, oh my gosh, I forget where it was from, but there was a fellow giving a speech at some religious university who essentially told all the women graduating there that you know they’ve been hoodwinked because you know they’ve been shown all these books and everything and gone through all these classes to to make them… They had all this book learning to get a job and everything and they don’t realize that the most important job that is in front of them right now is being a wife and a mother.

BR: Wow!

CW: Yeah!

BR: That takes balls. Literally.

CW: Yeah. Again, this is one of those things I just I just saw a snippet of it on Tik-Tok and I shouldn’t be sharing it without facts and figures in context. But it was clearly a guy giving a speech at a university. And it’s like, OK, people paid money. Women, lots of women paid money to go get a university degree at the university who has brought you to speak. And you’re just telling them that there was a waste of time.

0:32:52
BR: As long as you found a man, it’s all good, girls.

0:32:54
CW: Yeah, it’s time to waif up and push out some kids and you’re good to go.

0:32:59
BR: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, again, with all these moral panics, there’s a very strong element of fear. I say this as author of America the Fearful, which is my most recent book.

CW: Hasn’t been banned yet that we know of.

BR: Hasn’t been banned yet as far as I know. But again, I’ve thought a lot about the role of fear in in moral panics and in in sort of social contagion And things like that and it really you know, there’s fear of immigrants. There’s fear of drag queens. There’s fear of the unknown There’s fear of at the end of the day. I would argue it mostly comes down to fear of influence. Again, there’s nothing unique about books. We saw the same thing about violent video games, Mortal Kombat, is that gonna desensitize kids or kids who see Playboy or Penthouse, are they gonna have more view of women and so on?

0:33:50
CW: Yeah, books are like the OG though. I mean, books were around in the library of Alexandria, or I guess scrolls were around in the library of Alexandria, but there were no video games or anything like that back then. But books are like the original way that human beings have passed thought and ideas down from generation to generation and to other groups of people. And so I don’t think you’re ever going to really displace books as the main target for people who are afraid of ideas spreading.

BR: Yeah, I mean, I get one point that often seems to get overlooked while people are discussing bans and censorship or whatever side you’re on is that at the end of the day many of these claimed effects are demonstrable, they’re falsifiable, right? So if you truly believe, if your position is that having a drag queen read to children is going to make those children either have an increased risk for sexual assault or increased risk or increased likelihood, for example, that they will be LGBTQ. If that’s your belief, we can test this. This is not an unknowable thing, right? And yet that’s continually glossed over, right? It’s like they don’t want to look at the facts. They want to scare people. They want to get up in arms. Isn’t this terrifying? Isn’t this, oh my God, you know, if someone reads the book about the two male penguins that raised-

0:35:26
CW: Adopting a child, yeah.

0:35:27
BR: Yeah, and it’s like, again, if what they’re saying is true, if their premise is correct, then we can test this. I mean, there’s ways to find out whether-

0:35:36
CW: Well, they view it as unethical to even think about testing it. It’s not like we’re going to do control groups. No, but you can look at the numbers after the fact. You can look at it as the natural experiment. But they don’t want to hear that. They just want to say, if there’s even a chance, this is just one child saved. Just, you know, and you can’t measure things that way.

0:35:59
BR: Well, I, you know, I would have agreed that you can and I do because again, it’s the same principle behind stranger danger, right? Someone gets all freaking out because there is a convicted sex offender who was released five years ago living 10 miles away. Is it possible that that person will show up at your door and harm your children? Sure, it’s far more likely that your child will be abused physically, sexually in the other way by their teacher or another family member. So is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? No. So it’s I mean, I’m beating the same drum I’ve been beating for 20 years now, but it’s important to keep these things in context.

0:36:45
CW: Yeah. Now, child grooming and ideas about CRT are kind of amorphous things. We can talk about some concrete, definite harm that has come from people having information. And I think you know what I’m talking about in terms of incendiary material.

0:37:04
BR: Yes, it’s a really good topic. So there’s a book that I would recommend if people are interested in this. The title is The Wrong Hands, Popular Weapons Manuals weapons manuals and their historic challenges to a democratic society by Anne Larrabee. It’s a fascinating book. It came out a couple years ago. It looks at, again, we’re not talking about children’s books of gay penguins. We’re not talking about Mein Kampf.

0:37:28
CW: Are we talking about the anarchist cookbook?

0:37:31
BR: We are talking about the anarchist cookbook.

0:37:32
CW: I knew we’d be talking about that. Okay.

0:37:35
BR: So there’s a whole subgenre of these sort of subversive books. Probably the most famous is the Anarchist Cookbook, or Infamous. There was also the Poor Man’s James Bond, which I have a copy of somewhere around here. And their ilk. So there were a series of popular presses in the 70s and 80s. There was Paladin Press, which got very prominent in 1970. There was Loon Panics, which came out in 1975. If you’ve been paying attention to our previous episodes, you’ll know that the first time that I ever met, the first time I encountered Matt Crowley’s work was in a Loon Panics catalog.

0:38:16
CW: Yeah, and that whole culture kind of merged in with, like, I mean, when we had him and Tim Zamora, the torture king on Tim Cridland. They talked about meeting each other with these weird pamphlets and handbooks and reasons why you shouldn’t vote and just weird small press, I guess you’d call them small press books from places like that.

BR: Yeah, definitely counterculture. I mean, it had, there was just sort of the weirdest collection of just like, you know, books you’re not going to find, you know, on Amazon or Archie McPhee or just sort of, so these were underground stuff. And these books would cover everything from, you know, making, making meth, you know, how to make drugs, how to make ecstasy, MDMA, to poisons, how to make botulism, the, even ricin, which is a plot point in Breaking Bad, if people remember that one. There was a book titled Silent Death by a person called Uncle Fester, probably not his real name. There was also – I remember a book called Kitchen Improvised Plastic Explosives. There was a book called The Poisoner’s Handbook and so on. There was even a series of books called How to Kill. And of course, the appeal is to the sort of soldier of fortune, I’m going to learn how to kill people with my fingernail, you know, learn the Dim Mak.

0:39:44
CW: Very, very reminiscent of like the same person who wanted to learn Dim Mak.

BR: Exactly.

CW: Probably bought Faces of Death, the DVD or the VHS tape.

0:39:55
BR: Yeah, that’s a whole genre there. There were books, there was one by a guy named George Haduke, and he did a series of books titled Dirty Tricks. And it was all framed like, you know, is your ex-wife taking you to the cleaners? This is how to get her back. And there’s all these, like, dirty tricks from basically, like, flattening her tires to putting her on pornographic mailing lists. Of course, this was in the 70s. Things like that. So, homemade C4, things like that. So there was a whole series of these. And as you might imagine, there was some concern because, again, they’re literally telling you how to make bombs. This is not like, you know, I’m angry at somebody. It is here is a step by step process on how to kill people and or do harm.

0:40:50
CW: I’m going to step out of my earlier position and say there kind of should be something illegal about telling people how to make bombs.

0:40:59
BR: Therein lies the rub, as they say, because so, yeah, you pretty quickly come across complications with the First Amendment, right? Freedom of speech. There are limits, of course. They’re well known, you know, calling out, you know, fire in a crowded theater, there are limits to it. But for the most part, our system, for better or worse, tends to be pretty tolerant of these things. There are exceptions. For example, there are a couple of key laws that were passed just actually in the past decade or so. There’s 18 U.S. Code 239, which prohibits providing material support to terrorists.

CW: Now, this is reminding me of that guy who was trading with the Native Americans way back when.

0:41:48
BR: That that had had these been on the books back then, that’s what they would have gotten. And again, this is not this is not really abstract. I mean, for example, there was a online magazine called Inspire, which is published by Al-Qaeda, which appeared on the web in 2010 and it was a resource manual for bomb making, including how to make a bomb with a pressure cooker. You know where this is going.

0:42:14
CW: Yeah, that was put into use.

0:42:16
BR: It was. So later on in 2013, the Sarnoff brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon, they had used some of the materials from this website. It was crystal clear that they had. There’s a long history of people using these books. As I mentioned, probably the most famous example is the Anarchist Cookbook, which came out in 1971. If anyone’s interested, there’s a documentary called American Anarchist, which came out in 2016. And it interviewed the author of the Anarchist Cookbook, a man named William Powell. And Powell actually died shortly after the film came out. It’s an interesting look because he’s being interviewed many many years later, decades later, and been asked how does he feel about having written this infamous weapons manual that directly led to people being killed.

CW: Yeah, did he feel like he had blood on his hands or was he like, nah, just information?

0:43:09
BR: Well, it was it was interesting. He sort of went back and forth. And you can sort of see why. He said, look, I wrote this when I think he was early 20s or something, he was a college radical, it was 1971. He did express some resistance about it and he did feel some guilt about it. But at the end of the day, he’s like, look, I didn’t tell anybody to do this. Yes, I showed them how to make bombs, but as it turned out, he had actually gathered most of the information from the public library.

0:43:42
CW: He just put it all together in a convenient way.

0:43:47
BR: He put it together. He found weapons manuals published by the U.S. government. They’re right there, right? And so he didn’t invent this stuff. He just collected it and framed it. Really, the key here is that it was the first weapons manual of its type that really characterized the free speech aspect. There are the ones that are like, if you want to do something bad, if you want to hurt somebody, this is how you do it. The whole Anarchist Cookbook is framed as, this is free speech, you have the right to this information, it may hurt people, it may not. What you do with it is your own is your own business. But, you know, information should be free. And that was sort of the the angle that he took into it. And that was sort of unique among this group.

0:44:36
CW: That really seems to tie the first two amendments together, like you have a right to bear arms and and here and you have a right to the information on how to make them. Here it is.

0:44:46
BR: Right. So combining the two, and you can see why this is problematic from a banning point of view, right? Because – and you can go back and say, okay, well, some of these – the bombs are simplistic and anybody can learn how to do it, particularly online. Keep in mind this was the 1970s. You couldn’t just go online and find this stuff. So the question becomes, does the government have a vested interest in controlling this information? I would argue probably in some way. I mean, and keep in mind that we’re not just talking about pressure cooker bombs. Recently, for example, there was information that came out a couple of years back on how to make a suitcase bomb, a dirty bomb, a nuclear bomb, if you’re able to find the ingredients.

CW: Nuclear bomb! Oh my gosh.

BR: Yeah, I mean, yes, this is the concern, is that it’s one thing for responsible, air quotes here, governments such as US and Russia and India, Brazil, UK, and so on to have access to nuclear weapons, but with the democratization of information, organizations such as Al-Qaeda could raise millions of dollars and get enough, you know, refined uranium or plutonium to make a small nuclear bomb, which if exploded in a major city would be catastrophic. So you no longer need to be a first world power, even a third world power, to have this ability. And so that’s, I…

0:46:14
CW: Now, we’re getting off of the topic of book bans and into existential fears Celestia doesn’t want to think about.

0:46:21
BR: Well, let me circle this back for a second. So I’ll tell you one quick story. One of the stories was there was a group, a radical group. Do you know the Weather Underground?

0:46:34
CW: I’ve heard of them like back in the 80s or something, like a liberation front.

0:46:39
BR: Yeah, and they were sort of doing radical things and bombs and stuff and actually my father knew one of the people in that organization, Mark Rudd. But that organization had been accused of, and actually conducted various bombings for social change and so on. And as it turns out, this group when they were identified, they said, okay, they had the Anarchist Cookbook. But as it turned out, their main source of bomb making material and information was called the Blaster’s Handbook, which was published by the DuPont Company. Yes, that DuPont Company.

0:47:19
CW: OK, and I’m assuming DuPont published this for responsible military people. It just fell into the wrong hands.

0:47:29
BR: That’s this is how that’s how it happens, right? Like into the wrong hands. Right. So the question is, whose hands are the right hands and who’s to say, right? One thing to keep in mind in looking at weapons manuals and the attempts to ban or censor them by the government is that typically they failed. So, make whatever arguments you want one side or the other about whether, you know, governments have a vested interest in making sure, for example, your next door neighbor can’t, you know, explode a suitcase bomb in your city. The fact is that the First Amendment has really protected most of these cases. There was one case, earlier I mentioned Paladin Press, and that case was an interesting one because they were ultimately censored, they were basically self-censored. So it wasn’t the government that came down hard on them, they were sued in civil court. So what happened was the relatives of a woman named Mildred Horn was killed along with her son and it turned out that her husband had hired a hitman, a Navy veteran named James Perry to carry out the murders. And this hitman was inspired by and used information from a book titled Hitman.

CW: That’s to the point. OK.

BR: Could not be clearer. Mildred’s relatives like, well, hold on here. Like, you know, the widower hired this guy who admitted that he’d used information from this book and Paladin Press admitted that Perry had in fact ordered the book because, you know, they they did they did depositions and they could prove that. But they said, well, they had a First Amendment right to do so. And what was interesting was that the book Hitman was written allegedly by someone named Rex Farrell, sort of Farrell King. And in the book-

0:49:25
CW: That was the author, a guy named Rex Farrell?

BR: Yes.

0:49:28
CW: He sounds tough.

0:49:29
BR: He sounds very tough, right? So when you read the book, and I’ve looked at versions of it. He talks about being this sort of Chandler-esque, you know, hitman, hard-boiled, he’d done a bunch of tours and you would kill people with his finger and he was this and that. So as it turned out, Rex Farrell was in fact a woman living in a trailer in Florida.

CW: So she kind of catfished the whole character.

BR: Yeah, yeah, so she she knew nothing. She was not a professional hitman. She’d never killed anybody the whole thing was sort of just and apparently the as it came out in the lawsuit that she had wanted to write a Fiction a novel for this press and they’re like, well, we don’t really publish novels we publish, you know, like how to kill people. She’s like, okay.

0:50:19
CW: So so she took all of her research and instead of using it to craft a story about a hitman, she just published the research.

0:50:31
BR:Yeah. And apparently it wasn’t even really well-written research. It was all this sort of hard-boiled, you know, pulpy garbage.

0:50:40
CW: I’m imagining this letter, I’m sorry, prospective author, we don’t publish good books. We would like you to give us a bad book that’s not even really a book.

0:50:52
BR: And it reminds me of, not to circle back, but it reminds me of when we were doing the series on literary hoaxes, right? There was, I think it was Go Ask Alice.

0:51:01
CW: Yeah, people claiming to be some sort of hard-boiled, I mean, you could go into a million, what’s that, a million pieces.

BR: Yeah, yeah. The Anthony Godby Johnson story.

CW: Yeah, that fooled Oprah. And yeah, people claiming there’s somebody that they’re not to publish a book. Now in this woman’s case, who was not Rex Farrell, did she see any sort of penalty from the connection with this murder of the mother and child?

0:51:34
BR: No, because she was not sued directly. So the the the as I recall, the the the story, Horn’s family sued Paladin Press specifically. And in the end, they came to a settlement. And so it’s ironic that that Paladin Press, which had profited for decades from literally genuinely dangerous military manuals, only flinched when they were threatened with a civil suit.

CW: About a book by a female author who wasn’t even what she claimed to be. Now moving more towards today. I know we mentioned it earlier, but Ben did you see John Oliver’s most recent? Last week tonight.

BR: I did not.

CW: It was actually about libraries and darn it he scooped us because we have had this topic on our burner for quite a while. And and you know, I suppose he redeemed himself a little bit because a couple of weeks ago, he did UFOs and skeptics everywhere pointed out a bunch of stuff that John Oliver got wrong or ignored or didn’t quite frame the right way to show a skeptical viewpoint on UFOs. But when he did libraries, he summarized things pretty well. And also, he had a pretty nice running gag about the Berenstain Bears Mandela effect. So if you’re a skeptic, and you like Mandela effects, there’s that. He made a lot of points that you and I have talked about and that we’ve had in our notes for a while in terms of these libraries and schools are dealing with mobilized groups of parents, who are and some of them, sometimes they aren’t even parents, sometimes they are just simply people, as I said earlier, with too much time on their hands, who have decided in a very organized way to get together and write postcards and send emails and show up at the library board meetings to get people fired. And there’s a lot of complaints that are completely just context-free. And you’ve probably seen this. John Oliver had several video clips where if you just were to see the video clip, and you don’t have the information about what else is in that book, you don’t have the information about what is surrounding the dialogue, you just hear some lurid piece of, ah, and then he took her trousers off. Well, I can’t even repeat on our podcast some of the things that are said when they quote from these books. And yes, many books have a racy part, something that deals with genitals, something that deals with sex. And of course, I can’t help but mention here that counter activists have done the same thing with the Bible. They have they have if you read the part about the genitals as large as donkeys and emissions like like that of stallions and stuff, there are parts of the Bible that are pretty filthy. You can go into the part where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sexually take advantage of him. There’s incest, there’s murder, there’s rape. And so that’s an interesting example that people have been pulling up in order to try and get the Bible pulled out of libraries.

0:54:47
BR: Yeah, I can tell you that in my school library, there were quite a few books. And there were two particular books that I remember. There was a Blubber by Judy Blume. And there was a book called Clan of the Cave Bear.

CW: Oh, I remember that one. I actually read that one as an adult, as part of like a kid’s reading group that I was I was working with.

BR: Well, here’s the thing. I found one time when I was at the library, and as you might imagine, I spent quite a bit of time in the library, that there were certain pages that were heavily thumbed, usually about a third of the way into the book. On both of these books, many people had gone to this specific page or two, and they clearly hadn’t read the entire book. They went to page, you know, 318. And one time I was curious, and there was some references to fondling and stripping and this and that, and I was like, okay, well, you know. So, yeah, it’s, you know, take your pick. You can always take things out of context. And as you pointed out, I mean, I had mentioned earlier at the beginning at a local meeting that I was at, and they did the same thing where you had, while I was there, I think two or three people got up and they read this passage out of context. And, you know, of course they only had, you know, a minute and a half. So and there were no questions coming back to them. So had I been a counselor, I would have said, and what’s the context here? But of course, that wasn’t the setup. But it was they made their point like, oh, my God, is this horrifying? And then then it’d be like, well, you know, and, you know, this is there for anybody to read. Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t there for anybody to read. It was actually in the adult section.

0:56:23
CW: Yes.

BR: So the question is, OK, why is your kid in the adult section?

0:56:28
CW: Or one of the pieces that John Oliver highlighted, there was a librarian who pointed out in one of these meetings that if your child is in the library alone, they probably have a phone, in which case my library is the least of your problems.

BR: Yeah.

CW: That hits the nail on the head. people are worried about their child might come across this book in the children’s section or not in the children’s section, because there’s these like layers of deceptiveness here, where they read the piece context free, you know, something that provides an interesting little 30 second clip. And, and then they claim this is there for children to read. Well, no, in many cases, it’s not there for children to read. It is an adult’s book or it happens to be in the teen section. It’s not for five-year-olds. It’s for 15-year-olds who are wondering why their testicles are dropping and they could use some information on that. There’s just these layers. In some cases, the books in question were not even at the library that was being protested. There seems to be a lot of misdirected people again with, I’m going to say it the third time, with too much time on their hands.

0:57:44
BR: And an agenda.

CW: And an agenda. And Ben, you brought out the context of the pandemic with this and how a lot of these, a lot of these political activist parent groups kind of came together during the during the COVID pandemic. And they’ve got this energy for like, I’m going to fight the mask mandates. And we need to organize and fight this vaccine and this and that and all the public health restrictions. And now that those are gone, you know.

0:58:16
BR: Yeah, and oftentimes it’s framed as parental rights. And the reason they do that is because as soon as you frame it as my rights, then of course they’re framing it as in conflict with the Bill of Rights. But of course, a lot of these are manufactured rights. You don’t have the right to go into a store unmasked. If it’s a private business, yes, they can require you to wear a mask. It’s a private business. As long as they’re not discriminating on the basis of ethnicity or something else, yeah, they can tell you, go away.

0:58:58
CW: Well, it’s that same sense of entitlement that, like, there are mask mandates in these private industries or private stores, but I don’t like it, so I want my way to be what triumphs here. And you see that with the book bans. You know what? I don’t like that book. I don’t like the idea of my kids seeing that book, so no kids should see that book. No adults either, no libraries, no nothing. And yes, my tax dollars might only represent half of a penny for that library, but I should have an outsized effect on it. I should be able to get somebody fired.

0:59:33
BR: Yeah, and I really feel badly for the librarians who are often put in the middle of these things. I mean, they didn’t, when they signed up to be librarians, which is a professional I highly respect and admire, let me just say that for the record.

0:59:46
CW: Oh, yes.

0:59:47
BR: I hold librarians in very high esteem. They weren’t trying to be in the forefront of culture wars. They’re trying to help, you know, kids find out about Argentina.

0:59:57
CW: Yeah.

0:59:59
BR: And access information that they want to read, whether it’s novels or anything else. So they didn’t they didn’t want to be in the middle of this. I don’t really appreciate being thrust into it. But they’re being sort of forced into this, you know, taking sides and their position there, you know, they’re like, well, I I’m just here to try and, you know, help people find information and follow the way the books.

CW: And they’re becoming targeted, they’re being called groomers and pedophiles and Satanists, as you witnessed yourself, and it’s kind of ridiculous. It has widths of 1980s satanic panic about it sometimes. And yeah, we need all the misinformation, those people are generally librarians. That’s their jam. Let them do that instead of worrying about legislation. Because there has been legislation floated in a number of states that would put librarians in danger of jail time or criminal charges for quote unquote contributing to the delinquency of minors or showing obscene material to underage persons.

1:01:17
BR: Yep.

1:01:17
CW: But our final question here, Ben, how effective are book bans?

1:01:21
BR: Well, it’s hard to tell, right?

CW: Yeah.

BR: For a couple reasons. One is that, you know, you need to be clear about what a book ban is, right? So is it making it so that nobody can find this book? And the answer is no.

1:01:36
CW: Not today. I mean, back in the 1930s, yes, sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Back in the 1970s, probably.

BR: Yeah. But for example, today, you know, as you pointed out, I mean, most kids have access to the Internet through their phones or or home computers, they can find pretty much anything. So I’m not sure why parents think that school libraries are the only place where kids can find books because they can also find them on Amazon.com. They can find them at Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores, public libraries, other libraries, school libraries. So, the idea that you’re going to keep a child from looking at a given book because you have removed it from the shelves in one particular place is bizarre. I mean, it’s, you know, that being said, for many kids, that’s their main resource, right? So they may not be able to go to a different library. They may not have the resources to go somewhere else.

1:02:40
CW: Yeah, there’s definitely a have and have-nots here that’s being sifted apart. The thing I worry about is the cooling effect, and that’s really hard to measure, but it’s there. Where librarians will be aware of the public outrage, they will see the John Oliver show, they will see these ridiculous snippets of parents losing their mind just like they did about the COVID restrictions. They’ve taken that, they’ve channeled that energy into books now, and they don’t want to be a target of that ferociousness. So when they’re deciding on their new list, or when the school board is deciding on what books to teach, they will just move their preferences over and they’ll avoid Toni Morrison and replace it with something a little bit more banal. They’ll find what’s just, you know, placid and acceptable, and they’re not going to challenge the kids. The books that are in the school libraries will just generally tone down. I mean, tons of other books are getting swept up into this that maybe didn’t have any complaints lodged against them, but they’re like, oh, well, this book could be targeted. So you know what? Let’s nip it in the bud and get rid of it. That’s unfortunate.

1:03:56
BR: Yeah, and I think it’s also important to parse out that book bans have been instituted by a variety of different people for different reasons, and not just bans but also attempted bans. So we’re talking about complaints about them. And just because a book has been banned or removed doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s worth reading. I mean, Mein Kampf was briefly banned by Amazon. It was later reinstated, but I mean, it was technically banned for a while. That doesn’t mean that, oh, people need to go out and read it. So, it’s important to look at the reasons why someone is trying to ban it or complain about it and have it removed. There’s one example that struck me. Have you seen the meme that talks about how it says along the lines of that somebody was complaining that the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, made people uncomfortable.

1:04:51
CW: I have seen that meme. Yeah, it’s pretty popular among writer, literary people types.

1:04:57
BR: Yeah, and so it’s like it has a scene from the film and says, you know, that was the effing point of the book, made people uncomfortable.

CW: Yeah, exactly.

BR: But as it turns out, the story behind that is actually kind of interesting. It was actually an African-American family that requested it be removed.

CW: I did read about that. I mean, we probably should have mentioned a little more than we did that it’s come from both the left and the right. The people who would be described as liberals and on the left side have had problems with books like Mark Twain, too many uses of the N word, where white power and colonialism are seen as the thing you don’t want to expose children to.

1:05:44
BR: Yeah. In the case of To Kill a Mockingbird, a black family, actually a parent named Tujama Kamita, complained that there were nearly 50 racial slurs against African-Americans in the book. And they said, this is unacceptable. I mean, my child is black and my child is made uncomfortable by seeing the N-word repeatedly throughout this book. So circling back to the question, like, is it, you know, the whole point of the book is to make people feel uncomfortable. Presumably it’s not to make an African-American child feel uncomfortable, which is what the parent was claiming about.

CW: Yeah, yeah. And yeah, there’s a lot of ways to parse that out.

1:06:24
BR: Yeah.

CW: Another one of the effects of book bans, and we’ve kind of alluded to this, is yeah, it can sort of have the effect of increasing readership for a book or interest. There was, of course, we have to have a study. So I found a study from August 2023, which is done at Carnegie Mellon and George Mason universities, and they found there that banned books saw an increase of 12% in circulation at libraries that did not have the restrictions. So the study also found that the increased readership was largely boosted by previously lesser known authors and so the social media exposure surrounding certain titles brought their names up in the algorithm and got more people’s eyes on it. So certain titles, when they’re restricted, result in a boom for that book. And I’m sure you’ve heard of publishers as well like, oh, this book is going to be banned? Well, let’s print an extra 10,000 copies because there’s more sales. So in the end, this does, the whole book banning movement that’s happening right now, and as has happened in the past, it’s decreasing access for some people, but it creates interest among others. So those who can get their hands on them, they’re gonna be the higher income kids, from more educated families who have transportation, who have access to all these other ways of getting a book in their hands. Many of us can just order it on Amazon, but think back when you were a 10-year-old, you couldn’t really do that. Even when I was like a 15-year-old, I mean, when I was 15, there was no Amazon, but there are kids who can’t just order a $25 book just like that. It’s like, you got food and medicine you’ve got to buy first. So it’s this stifing effect.

BR: And there’s been an increase in LGBQ+ studies, and you  know, otherwise, kids aren’t seeing representations of themselves in stories. And you can argue how useful that is, but I mean, the point is that if we do want people to see themselves in media, particularly underrepresented groups, then the fact that some parent somewhere doesn’t like it, that’s tough, and then make sure your kid doesn’t read it.

1:09:14
CW: That’s a good way to summarize it. If anybody wants the Cliff Notes for this entire episode, do you want that book banned? Because you don’t like it for your kid? That’s tough.

1:09:23
BR: Exactly.

(MUSIC)

1:09:24
CW: Well, Ben, thanks for bringing your passion about books and your knowledge and your history, stuff you’ve dug into.

BR: I did the best I could. Hopefully people learned a little bit, offered a couple points. Again, you know, we can’t cover everything in an hour and change. We’re just sort of hitting a couple points, but hopefully we added some perspective and context to the discussion.

1:10:05
CW: Yeah, the moral of the story is show up at your library board and city council meetings. If book bans and library restrictions are making their way into your town, be a squeaky wheel. Fight the good fight.

1:10:18
BR: Absolutely.

1:10:18
We would like to extend heartfelt thanks to our top-tier sponsor-level patrons, Amy Frusciauer-Kelley, Dr. Angela Matkey, Elizabeth Leggett, and Laura Ellis. Thank you for your continued support of our podcast. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, or just throwing us a buck or two, please visit Squaring the Strange on Patreon.com and browse our selection of patron rewards. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here and we are grateful to our generous friends who

1:10:56
help us bring you quality content. If you are short on cash and want to just give us moral support, remember to recommend us to a friend, mention us on social media, or give us a review on your favorite podcast dispenser. If you have comments or topics you’d like to see covered, come join our community on the Squaring the Strange podcast discussion group on Facebook. Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC. Copyright 2021. Theme music provided by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Keytard & Feathered, and Pasquale Romero.

1:11:30
Additional support by Ashley Romero, Robert Sandin, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any other affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo