The leftist assault on books
To find the real book banners, look left
Leftists routinely campaign to ban books at various points in their lifecycles, from birth to sale. Typically, these are books that dissent from or rebuke leftist ideology:
Publication: They try to kill books in the womb, campaigning to prevent their publication, or even try to prevent the publication of any book by certain people. See three examples below, the last of which is plural.
Availability: For books that make it to publication, leftists campaign to prevent their sale by booksellers and keep them out of libraries (or hide them), reducing their readership or even awareness of their existence. In at least one case, the pressure came from government – the Biden administration. See three examples below, the last of which is plural.
Destruction: With respect to classic literature, leftists rewrite/destroy other people’s books to conform with the latest version of leftist ideology. They’ll delete passages, change words, and even insert complete passages of their own. See one example below — I find this behavior too disturbing and outrageous to linger on today. (Leftists also deface classics with “trigger warnings” for evolving, hard to follow reasons.)
This is a dynamic essay I want to update with examples and feedback from others over time. Everything here is just what I happen to know rolling out of bed so to speak, from casual exposure to news and online discourse. It’s been jarring and awkward to see the narrative leftists fabricated around “Republican book bans” given that leftists are the ones actually banning books in every possible way. Realistically, they’re the only people with the psychology — the mindset — for true book bans, the only people who are so motivated and have the ideology and Orwellian machinery for it. It simply wouldn’t occur to modal conservatives or libertarians to try to stop the publication of some leftist’s book, for example.
Publication
Over 250 leftists lobbied Penguin to not publish Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book. They cited her joining the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, and asserted an “inalienable human right” to kill or abort a human fetus. Leftists often speak as though they’re unaware of other accounts of rights, and even of the nature of political philosophy as such — that there are different accounts of rights and justice. In this case, they seem unaware of the anti-abortion position — that a human fetus is a rights-bearing being that cannot ethically be killed or destroyed in normal circumstances. From the anti-abortion perspective (not mine), this is a human rights issue, and thus isn’t refuted by simply citing human rights. Moreover, this was a court ruling on what the United States constitution has to say about a right kill or destroy human fetuses, and whether the federal government can preempt the states on this matter. This is largely independent of one’s view of whether abortion should be legal or not, with what restrictions, and on what foundations, in any given jurisdiction.
Leftist employees at Penguin Random House lobbied to stop the publication of clinical psychologist’s Jordan Peterson’s next book, and were joined by leftists in media. One censorship supporter at the Guardian said, “Nobody has a human right to a lucrative book contract without regard for whether their opinions are sound or valuable.” Note that the leftist here thinks his opinion on whether another human being’s opinions or work are “sound” or “valuable” should govern whether they should be able to speak freely, in the form of a book. (The “human right to a lucrative contract” is empty rhetoric obscuring the call for censorship – they’d oppose publication on any terms, and support government banning the book.)
Over 250 leftists lobbied publishers to not publish any books by former President Donald Trump or anyone in his administration. This appears to have been successful for the most part.
I’m not aware of efforts by non-leftists, conservatives, libertarians, etc. to prevent the publication of a leftist’s book, books by Democratic politicians, jurists, etc.
Availability
Leftists frequently try to block the sale of books that contest their ideology, by lobbying major booksellers to ban their sale (many online booksellers also host smaller third-party sellers, and when they ban the sale of a book they generally ban even the third parties from selling it on their platform).
If leftists could legally ban a book, there’s no question they would happily do so. The bottom line with censorship is the reduced access or exposure to the censored discourse. It doesn’t matter whether that’s achieved by preventing a book’s publication, making it unavailable or difficult to purchase, or using the coercive machinery of the state. The bottom line is that leftists make it difficult or impossible for other human beings to get the book. For example, getting a book banned by Amazon is likely devastating to its reach.
The Biden administration successfully pressured Amazon to ban the sale of books by certain Russian authors, including philosopher Aleksandr Dugin (the administration and Amazon refuse to disclose the full list of banned Russian authors and books). This is apparently tied to the Ukraine War and the Biden administration’s broader efforts to censor Russian perspectives that might undermine its war agenda (see what’s happened to Russian state media like RT, and even Sputnik). For a brief period, Dugin’s book on Heidegger – and only that title – was allowed back on Amazon, but that’s no longer the case. (Dugin’s 29-year-old daughter, Platonist philosopher Darya Dugina, was murdered in Moscow last year by the Ukrainian government. As I’m sure you can tell, the US government commissioned this chilling article to express their mild annoyance on the matter.)
Every major book contesting leftist “gender identity” ideology is banned by at least one major bookseller, and is vulnerable to more bans. By contrast, leftist perspectives on “gender identity” are not similarly banned. For example, Gender Identity Workbook for Teens, a book that indoctrinates kids into the “gender identity” cult, is available at every major bookseller. These book bans only go one way – non-leftist discourse is targeted and sometimes banned, while leftist discourse is not.
Leftists strive to keep books contesting their ideology out of libraries, or even hide them if they must. For example, leftists in Vermont refuse to stock Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, asserting that it “goes against our equity policy and can cause harm”. That translates to: “it contests leftist (our) ideology” — their “equity” construct is a newish, proprietary leftist construct and non-leftists might contest or reject it from any number of standpoints. The assertion that a non-leftist book or speech “causes harm” is a new Orwellian tactic. Librarians in Britain have repeatedly hidden books contesting leftist gender ideology.
Below is a table of the current bookseller ban situation for the following titles:
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by former Wall Street Journal journalist Abigail Shrier.
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, by Irish journalist and mathematician Helen Joyce, PhD.
Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children, by BBC Newsnight journalist Hannah Barnes.
When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, by Ryan T. Anderson, PhD, a political philospher who approaches the topic through a Catholic lens.
Gender Identity Workbook for Teens, by Andrew Maxwell Triska.
Amazon suddenly banned Anderson’s book after three years, without notifying him or his publisher, and didn’t explain why until US Senators pressed them (leftists rarely explain their censorship or even communicate that they’re doing it). Amazon then said that it wouldn’t sell books that frame transgenderism as a mental illness. Anderson disputes that he does so, and in any case it’s an empirical, scientific question — and a potentially complex one — whether transgenderism is a mental illness, comorbid with known mental illnesses, or even a unitary construct/way of being. If Amazon’s house scientists think they’ve discovered that it isn’t (not theoretically possible at this stage), they didn’t say so. Moreover, the other, unbanned books might actually frame it as such more than Anderson’s does. Amazon isn’t applying the intellectual capacity needed to differentiate books that do or don’t violate leftist dogma on this topic, and in this case they simply discriminate against Catholic/Christian perspectives, which are as valid as any other.
You’ll notice that Target bans all books contesting leftist “trans” ideology, while selling a book that preys on teens. It’s not clear if they ban non-leftist books on other topics as well. It’s a remarkable company. Their CEO Brian Cornell flagrantly lied on CNBC recently, denying that Target placed women’s bathing suits — modified for men to “tuck” their genitals — with children’s merchandise, and that they worked with a disturbing Satan-worshipping trans activist designer. Both facts are well established (see the link above and here).
I’m not aware of any efforts by non-leftists, conservatives, libertarians, etc. to get booksellers to pull/ban books that contest conservative or libertarian views or what have you. Nor am I aware of a Republican administration pressuring Amazon or any other bookseller to ban books undermining their war or other policy agendas, or to ban any books whatsoever.
Destruction
Saving on matches and lighter fluid, leftists simply reach into other people’s work and rewrite it. The most salient example is the work of Roald Dahl, which was violently altered by a leftist trans activist at Puffin (like all the adult trans activists I’ve seen, he’s a man who asserts that he’s a woman or perhaps some newer construct). Entire passages were deleted, the meaning of others changed, men converted to “people” or women, the color black deleted, the word fat replaced, guns deleted or converted to people (?), mention of Joseph Conrad replaced by Jane Austen, mention of Rudyard Kipling replaced by John Steinbeck, etc. A full explanation is out of scope here, and would be extremely unpleasant for me, but the short version is that leftists aim to embed their ideology in every book they can, including those written by the long dead, via their Orwellian “sensitivity readers” and organizations like Inclusive Minds. Specifically, they apply their new race and gender ideologies, associated false constructs like “systemic racism”, “marginalized groups”, and “white supremacy”, along with a string of fake clinical-sounding pathologies like “transphobia”, “homophobia”, and “fatphobia” (each often cast as “internalized”). Why leftists consistently smear non-leftist humans as motivated by pathological fear specifically, as opposed to some other emotion or other reasons, is a good question — it looks a strategy intended to humiliate, an extra insult perhaps especially aimed at people and cultures they see as masculine.
This Orwellian vandalism is worse than a simple ban, and I suspect Dahl would prefer that leftists just light a match. It is loathsome to touch someone else’s work, their words, their creations, and alter them. Doing so is an act not just of destruction, but of desecration, a violation that would only occur to barbarians. It not only strips the writer of the sanctity of his creation, of his mind, but it deprives readers of truth and beauty, and of a connection to those who came before us. It potentially erases our history, our collective memory carried through past writers and everything that shaped and informed their perspectives. I find this behavior so disturbing that I hate talking about it — the details of their changes to Dahl, Fleming, et al will need to be documented by others. I don’t like having to make obvious points on this issue, or deal with leftist rationalizations and spin — we should flatly and fiercely oppose desecrating other people’s books, embedding anyone’s political ideology into other people’s books, and see the obvious reasons why in a flash.
NOTE: In response to the outrage, Puffin said they’d continue to publish Dahl’s actual books in addition to the vandalized versions (they originally intended to only publish the latter). It’s not clear if this means anything — they could choose to ship very few of the real books, and schools might only get the fakes. They could also quietly stop publishing the real books in a couple of years, which might not be reported by legacy leftist media. It’s extremely unwise to compromise with modern book burners — they’re relentless and dishonest. (Puffin has exclusive rights to Dahl’s works through his family.)
Bottom Line
The essence here is that leftists are interfering with humanity’s ability to read books, either by preventing their publication, preventing their sale at the most convenient sellers, keeping them out of libraries (or hidden), or simply rewriting them, in other words erasing them. The bottom line is that someone’s ideas and words are blocked or erased to some degree or another. The simple test is: Is the book available everywhere? If not, is this because of deliberate and non-commercial intervention? Censorship is a spectrum, and runs the gamut from not being able to get the book from Amazon or your preferred seller, or at your library, to spending months hunting down a surviving copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the year 2043.
“Republican Book Bans”
Despite their fervent commitment to banning books any way they can, leftists have established an opposite narrative, that Republicans and conservatives are wantonly banning books. The reality is that people discovered porn and pedophile grooming books in school libraries, and have acted (somewhat slowly) to remove them. The porn is exclusively gay/”queer” for some reason, never straight, and leftists placed a number of key titles in school libraries nationwide. (I don’t think straight porn equivalents to these books exist — a children’s book that shows men and women having sex.) A good example is Gender Queer.
Legacy leftist media consistently conceal the fact that the books are porn. Gender Queer might be described as a “memoir” or an “LGBTQ+ book” (here’s CBS News for example). I’ve never seen a leftist outlet simply show the contents, as above, even blurred, which would expose the problem. Note that Gender Queer is quite a bit worse than pornography. I read it, and it valorizes severe mental illness and parent abuse, and promotes an animalistic selfishness, narcissism, and sexual nihilism that I’ve never encountered in life or literature. The character’s/author’s discussion of which proprietary pronoun to use, and how much she enjoys enforcing others’ compliance with it, vaporized any remaining interest I had in using anyone’s pronouns (an absurd possessive clause). [She chooses E. Yes, the letter E is her pronoun. I couldn’t possibly explain.]
It’s unclear why the pornographic nature of the books hasn’t led to the arrest the leftists who put them in school libraries — it’s illegal to share porn with minors. We should ask the same question regarding leftist school officials and coaches who force girls to be seen naked or in their underwear by boys (or even 50-year-old men), or expose them to nude boys/men, in locker rooms. That’s sexual assault last I knew, and various accesory, conspiracy, and facilitation charges would seem to be available to prosecutors. We should demand that they prosecute.
Other leftist books like Let’s Talk About It prey on children by encouraging them to view porn and take nude photos of themselves and share them. The linked story is about a father discovering the book in an Alaska school library. It doesn’t matter where you live, or that American schools are supposed to be decentralized — leftist culture is remarkably homogenous nationwide and acts swiftly to embed indoctrination in their newest, most extreme dogma and mores. As recently as 2022, I was appalled by conservatives’ use of the word “groomer” in discourse around leftist gay- or trans-focused books and course materials in schools, but then I saw the books... Obviously, encouraging children to take nude photos of themselves and share them is a flagship case of grooming children for adult sexual predators.
Note that there are worse books than Gender Queer and Let’s Talk About It in school libraries. I’m disoriented by this situation and don’t want to talk about some of the porn leftists put in front of kids — I’m not the best person to tackle this issue.
School Context
The context here is schools, generally government/public schools funded via coercive taxation. Within that context, there are two subsidiary contexts:
School libraries
Curricula/course materials
We can safely say the default position forever was: No porn in school libraries (and probably no porn in public, grown-up libraries). The “book bans” in that context are only happening because leftists broke the agreement, an agreement so basic we never had to think about it.
A library is an act of curation, and a school library might have space for a few thousand titles. Even given infinite capacity, there are many, many books we wouldn’t house — porn, guides to violence, sex guides (e.g. The Joy of Sex), Anarchist Cookbook type material, bombmaking tomes, cult indoctrination, a large swath of suicidal discourse, books that valorize eating disorders, Holocaust denial favorites, trashy, misogynistic pick-up artistry like The Game, the book equivalents of weird German kink movies, romance novels, the desecrated remains of literature vandalized and rewritten by leftists, and so on.
Finding any such books in a school library and calling for their removal would count as “banning books” in leftist parlance. But obviously we all believe in banning books in the sense of having standards for what goes into a library for children and teens — a taxpayer-funded school library. Leftists most certainly believe in banning books — just try to put books countering leftist ideology in these same school libraries and see what happens. I’m sure that leftists will block many such efforts, and have tried to pull such books. And note that these are real books, the kind with words — no porn. They’re books centered on ideas, intellectual frameworks, appraisals of scientific evidence, etc.
The issue is that a school is a specific context, with a specific set of purposes, and we’re going to have some thoughts, hopefully some principles and values that we can articulate, on what sorts of material is appropriate in a school library and what children should be taught in classrooms. This isn’t a matter for fake “experts”, and any “expert” defending porn in school libraries can be dismissed out of hand.
Leftists have circled the wagons to defend the porn and indoctrination in their ideology (along with sending disturbed male drag queens into schools — even kindergarten — to read to kids, often books that falsely teach kids that they might be “trans” or that conveniently legitimize the drag queen’s own “identity”). In many cases, I’m not sure that people know what they’re defending.
What’s also happening here is that leftists evidently have a sexual philosophy they haven’t told us about, and they’re trying to indoctrinate everyone’s children in it. I’m not sure if it has a name — it seems to spring from the padded rooms of academia in the form of Queer Theory, a nihilistic philosophy waging a systematic war on normality, objective standards, the sacred, and beauty. This sexual philosophy removes sexual behavior from both the moral domain and a relationship context, to say nothing of love. Its model of the human seems to be that we’re bags of meat, and that anything goes. There’s no apparent place for profundity, character, depth, what many might call morals, self-regulation, decency, or love. They use the word love, as in “love is love”, but they seem to be referring to sex or fleeting sexual relationships — we’ve tumbled into such savagery that it could take us a thousand years to catch up to Ancient Greece. They had philia, eros, agape, and storge, along with the Stoics, Epicureans, eudaimonists, and hedonists. We just have predatory hedonists grunting “love is love”.
Porn aside, it’s clear that leftists are indoctrinating America’s children in the latest version of their ideology, an ideology many casual leftists/Democratic voters aren’t familiar with. How many Democratic voters do you think could make sense of this?
That’s K-3 curricula in Portland schools. When alarmed parents pushed back, they were told this isn’t ideology — it’s just “teaching kids that trans people exist”. That’s a common message from the left. All this indoctrination is just that “trans people exist”. In fact, they say the same about porn like Gender Queer — it’s just showing kids that trans people exist, or sometimes that “it’s important that kids see themselves in books”. That is, the “trans kids” they create by indoctrination (starting in K-3!) need to see trans characters in books, having sex and being trashy and so on.
In summary, parents are responding to porn in school libraries and leftist ideological indoctrination in classrooms. Today’s schools are profoundly different from even the 2000s, much less the 1980s or earlier. It’s out of scope to detail what leftists have done to schools, and how they’re able to spread their cult ideology practically overnight to schools from Florida to Alaska. It’s a similar phenomenon to the corruption of higher education that more Americans have noticed in recent months due to the extreme antisemitism on campuses, including harassment, riots, and tearing down posters of Jewish hostages, all springing from the maniacal leftist ideology in which American youth are indoctrinated before they’re educated enough to question or debunk it. Where leftists fervently ban and destroy books in the world at large, aiming to keep adults and children alike from reading them, non-leftists — mostly conservatives — are trying to keep leftists from indoctrinating and ruining their children in schools that they’re forced to pay for. Not the same.
Joe Duarte is a social psychologist and focuses on the nature and consequences of ideological bias in media and academia. His doctoral dissertation focused on the role of malicious envy in antisemitism. You can reach him at gravity@protonmail.com.
Notes:
Need to add leftist book bans in schools, like the To Kill a Mockingbird story, and how leftist media have spun it as “protecting” kids. I think it’s also been pulled from public (not school) libraries.
Add the broader leftist commitment to censorship, like the Biden administration censoring facts and policy views on social media, Democratic voter support for censorship, the Congressional committee members, and leftist censorship in scientific journals re: trans ideology, the Nature retraction of the female mentorship study, nonsubstantive political retractions of peer-reviewed masking and ivermectin research (not to be confused with fraud cases).