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“Book bans” aren’t real. A “book ban” is a euphemism for library curation that leftists find disagreeable. Every book on the always well-stocked Barnes & Noble “banned book” display can be bought online. A parent can purchase their children copies of The 120 Days of Sodom, The Turner Diaries, Mein Kampf, and Das Kapital in one sitting and have them on the porch in a couple of days. There is no banned book.
So, it was entirely predictable that the Supreme Court recently declined to hear a challenge against a Texas county’s removal of 17 books from its public libraries. A few residents north of Austin argued that their First Amendment rights were infringed on because they were unable to compel taxpayers to provide them with their favored titles. That’s not how it works.
For years, PEN America and other progressive activist groups have spearheaded the “banned book” panic to gin up anger about alleged censorship. Conservatives have “banned” books in the same way Republicans have “banned” contraception. Democrats are under the impression that failing to provide something for a person is the same as denying it.
PEN America said more than 3,700 unique books were banned during the 2024-2025 school year, totaling 6,870 individual instances. “Book bans harm public school systems and restrict education,” it contended. “Book bans are the result of coordinated campaigns by individuals and groups, some of whom harbor homophobic, white supremacist, and Christian nationalist views.”
Unlike PEN America, I’m unable to bore into the soul of parents to determine what views they harbor. What I do know is that virtually none of the books on the “banned” list have any special literary, artistic, or educational value. Many of them are fine. I’m a fan of “banned” author Chuck Palahniuk. But do middle school children need to be reading the horror novel Lullaby? Not really. Moreover, a preponderance of the books on the “banned” list are clearly meant to propagandize students in cultural progressivism — namely, the normalizing of transgenderism, homosexuality, and racial identitarianism.
If that’s what parents desire, it’s certainly a choice. But there’s no facet of free expression that entails propping up your ideological choices, especially ones that have nothing to do with American civics or tradition or fundamental education.
One of the biggest clues to the inherent dishonesty of PEN America’s campaign is the innocuous language it uses — often picked up by journalists — to describe the alleged contents of these banned books. Any normie who digs a little will see why most are obviously used for indoctrination.
One of the top ten “banned” books, for instance, is All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, which the publisher describes as “a young adult memoir-manifesto, exploring the author’s experiences growing up Black and queer in New Jersey and Virginia, covering topics like gender identity, toxic masculinity, family, and Black joy.” It’s got it all! Also, the book apparently contains graphic descriptions of masturbation, oral sex between cousins, and anal penetration between teenagers. If you want to order it for your children, it’s available on Amazon. A similar graphic novel on the list is Flamer by Mike Curato, which tackles “religious bigotry,” suicide, and homophobia. Perhaps the best way to judge if a book is appropriate for your middle schooler would be to ask yourself if you would feel comfortable reading all sections of the book aloud. I suspect most parents would not.
While researching for this piece, I ran across a Chicago library system program called “Fight the Power! Banned Books For Teens,” where librarians hand the above titles to children to circumvent imaginary book bans. Not incidentally, in 24 Illinois schools, most of which are in Chicago, not a single student was proficient in reading.
This speaks to the unhinged priorities of many modern educators.
PEN America’s contention that “Christian nationalists” and “white supremacists” are coordinating book bans revolves around the notion that parents are trying to stop their children from learning about slavery. I’m sure there are a few bigots out there in the world, but this is largely a smear. A closer look at the “banned” books list finds a handful of titles that deal with slavery: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and the pseudohistory The 1619 Project, a book written by opinion columnists, which makes the fictitious claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. Now, Beloved and Kindred might be fine novels, and they might be about slavery, but they also deal with rape, incest, and torture. It is rational for any conscientious parent to explain those things to their children.
Then again, it should also be said that some of the alleged victims of this purported campaign of erasure are so preposterous that they don’t really need much investigation. And are we truly supposed to believe that parents and children are having a difficult time reading Jodi Picoult and Stephen King, one of the bestselling authors in all of history?
Now, 3,700 challenged books are actually quite a trivial number considering there are around 140,000 public schools in the United States and 125,000 public libraries. But progressives run virtually every one of those major school districts, and so they don’t need to “ban” books in schools. They have already decided what your children are seeing. If you don’t think so, ask yourself how many novels in the local young adult section are critical of abortion or celebrate the Second Amendment or capitalism or the superiority of traditional families. The Left has used schools as centers of cultural propaganda. There is nary a high school where there aren’t numerous copies of Howard Zinn’s pseudohistory of the U.S. Anecdotal evidence tells me that libraries, even in red areas, put a premium on pushing progressive cultural mores through literature. This is the reason for the “book ban” panic.
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Do some hypersensitive parents occasionally go overboard? Of course. But the local elementary school or library is not a bookstore. It is a state entity. And state entities in this country are controlled through democratic means. Someone needs to decide what children see.
Now, if, like me, you find the thought of the state curating any reading unfortunate, there exists a perfectly viable policy option to fix the problem. It’s called voucher programs and school choice, which would allow parents to send their children to institutions that comply with their cultural, religious, and social outlooks. Until then, however, schools and public libraries answer to communities and parents, not the reverse.
