1411: Banned Books | Skeptical Sunday

1411: Banned Books | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher, Nick Pell.

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You might have even seen a list of banned books posted online or even sought out that list for yourself. And when you saw it, there's a good chance you thought, gee, didn't I read half of these in high school? But all of this raises an important question.

Just how banned are these banned books? Are we in the middle of some kind of crackdown on freedom of speech or are a lot of loud voices just making much ado about nothing? Here today to help me get a read on the situation is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

Nick, you love a good bookstore, so you've almost certainly seen these displays with banned books on them.

Nick Pell: Yeah, man, the books are so bad that there's a big display with banned books and red letters above them. I was just in a bookstore last Sunday and I was terrified the entire time that the American Gestapo was going to burst in at any second and start arresting people for reading Harry Potter.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's really the thing. We have to define our terms here. What does banned mean in this case?

Nick Pell: So in the case of banned books displays, it usually means they were challenged somewhere. The book might not even have been removed, but I'm going to argue that removal of a book in most cases is not a ban.

Jordan Harbinger: So challenged can mean that some people just, what, showed up to a school board meeting and demanded they remove the books from the curriculum?

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's usually there, the library. We currently have a little controversy in my town because there's parents who don't want books about transgenderism in the children's section of the library. But the whole banned thing, it's such a red herring.

I'm sure out there someone is saying that we should throw people in jail for owning, publishing, or reading certain books. But the majority of the time, they're just trying to get a book moved from one section of the library to the other, say the elementary school area to the middle school area. Other times, people want books removed from the library altogether, taken off the curriculum, stuff like that.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Which you think is not the same thing as actually banning the book.

Nick Pell: I think it's clearly not. If I can still go on Amazon and buy the book without going to jail. There are close to 60 countries where the Bible is banned.

Most of them are Muslim countries. North Korea is a non-Muslim country where the Bible is banned. It is possibly the most banned book in the world.

I never see it on any of these displays of banned books. Banned in these cases means jail time. It means flogging.

It can mean the death penalty. There are several countries where The Communist Manifesto is either outright banned or heavily restricted.

Jordan Harbinger: How do you restrict to The Communist Manifesto?

Nick Pell: It sounds silly, the license thing, and it's hyperbolic, but it's not that far from the truth. There's countries where teachers are allowed to talk about it in class and you're allowed to study it as a important historical work, but you are not allowed to propagandize with it.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. I would assume if you're in Poland or something, you're usually talking about how bad it is or how it didn't work out that well. I don't know.

I would actually love if some of our Eastern European listeners would tell me what this means in their case. Can they just pick up Karl Marx or is that not available or is that even illegal somehow?

Nick Pell: You can teach it as a piece of literature, but you can't freely distribute it in the way that you and I understand it in the United States. Like there's countries we're distributing it as like, hey, check this out, this is a great idea. That could theoretically land you in jail.

It could be legal or illegal depending on the context. I don't think anyone is like in Poland or Czechoslovakia are like kicking down doors and arresting people for owning a copy of Capital. Mein Kampf is kind of banned in a similar way in about a dozen countries around the world.

But I know this is true of fascist writings. I believe it's also true of communist writings. They tend to have general bans on political extremism.

And so it's not that the book is per se banned. It's that certain works are banned by virtue of being politically extremist works. So there's not like a list and these books are on it.

It's like they have laws against political extremism that are understood to cover these books, some of which can be read and some of which cannot. But even the ones that you can read, like you can't be handing them out to whip people into a Nazi fervor or a communist fervor or something like that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. Right. So if you're in a college class studying World War Two, maybe you can read a passage from Mein Kampf or something like that.

But you can't just hand out copies at a meeting and try and get people to join your club. Isn't this a good idea? Yeah, you can't do that.

It's easy for me to say because I'm not German, but I feel like, hey, unban it because then people can see how shitty and pedestrian Mein Kampf is. I remember reading Mein Kampf and being like, I was incredibly unimpressed with this Hitler fella. And yeah, Hitler was not a very good painter either, by the way.

No. Hitler was horrible. But you'd have to be a special kind of turd to read Mein Kampf and turn your opinion around based on that.

I mean, it's some pathetic drivel. Anyway, go on.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I've also read it. And I remember thinking, like, what Slavic dude stole this guy's girlfriend was kind of like my reaction to it, you know, failed artists who turn to political extremism and are angry at people who are doing better in life than they are is kind of poking a lot of buttons of things I don't like all at once. But more to the point, I think there is a point that used to be much more commonly said sunlight is the best disinfectant.

And if somebody is troubled by the ideas presented in a book, it behooves them to read it and familiarize themselves with those ideas to better understand them, to better be able to combat them. Presumably, there are other books that are banned around the world. I'm just using these as examples because I assume that everyone knows, roughly speaking, what's in the Bible, The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, OK. So under the definition of banned that you're using, are there actually any books which are presently banned in the United States?

Nick Pell: Not a single one. In fact, there hasn't been a trial over the legality of a book since 1966. That was a case heard before the Massachusetts Supreme Court over one of my favorites, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which is, yeah, it's a pretty nasty book.

If you've ever seen the David Cronenberg movie, it's pretty tame in comparison to the book.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I read the book and it was one of those buy all of the top 50 books on Amazon because I live in Germany and I need a bunch of stuff to read in English. And I just I'll just get all of these sight unseen. They must be great if it's on this list.

And I remember reading it and it was super gross. But then I was like, what am I reading? What is this some sort of test to see what the author can get away with publishing?

I mean, I don't remember anything specific. It sounds like some sort of delusion, like a bad trip. The whole thing sounded like a bad trip plus a really raunchy porn kind of thing mixed together.

I don't know. I just remember being like, what was this? I put it away and I was like, OK, all right.

Can't unsee most of that. Next. What's next on the list?

Nick Pell: That's not really the worst description of Naked Lunch. I'm like a minor expert on Burroughs. I've read a lot of Burroughs.

If you saw the thread on the Reddit about 21st century art, I kind of just read the same 10 guys over and over. Burroughs is one of the 10 guys that I read over and over. And you're not like totally wrong.

There's a ton of that book that's just bizarre opioid hallucinations. I think there's some kind of like deeper artistic value to it, but that's neither here nor there. So this book was banned in Boston and banned in Boston.

It used to have a Streisand effect in this country, you kind of have to like change what you think about what Boston is like now, because in the 1960s, Boston was not known for yahoos who were really into sports and yell at each other and Irish guys who robbed banks. It was known for like stodgy Puritan, hyper morality police kind of stuff. Ulysses was banned in Boston by James Joyce.

Lots of stuff was banned in Boston. And so if you wanted to like Streisand effect your book into nationwide attention, you would just simply slap a banned in Boston sticker on it and people would go, oh, it's banned in Boston, I've got to read that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, the Streisand effect refers to the singer Barbra Streisand. I guess somebody had taken or published pictures of her house and then she's like, take it down.

I'm going to sue everybody who has this up. And she made a big deal out of it. And then people like me who would definitely never have cared at all otherwise was like, I must see the house that Barbra Streisand doesn't want me to see.

This must be some house. And also, you don't tell me what to do. I want to see your house.

So banned in Boston, it sounds like, just had the impact of making people want to go out and buy whatever it was that was banned in Boston, right?

Nick Pell: Yeah. And I know New England has this reputation for being this super tolerant, liberal in the modern sense reputation. But among Boston's lesser known nicknames is the Birmingham of the North, which is a reference to the fact that they didn't integrate their schools until the 1980s.

Jordan Harbinger: Wait, how can that be true?

Nick Pell: Boston public schools were not deemed compliant with federal school integration laws until 1988.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, my God.

Nick Pell: I was obsessed with the Boston busing crisis as a teenager. It's a crazy little wiki rabbit hole to go down. In general, though, like even today, I would say that New England is a really puritanical and provincial place.

I mean, at least when I was growing up, you couldn't buy beer on Sundays until I was in my 20s. There's a weird kind of complication because now it has broadly liberal politics. That wasn't even necessarily true when I was growing up.

But it's certainly not true everywhere today. So politically liberal, sure. But I would say at least when I haven't lived there for 20 years, I would say that, yeah, it was insular and provincial last I was there.

But yeah, banned in Boston was marketing gold because like what sells better than don't read this book, the squares in Boston, a little too spicy for you. And so, yeah, like publishers would try and get their books banned in Boston for this purpose.

Jordan Harbinger: What are some other books that have been historically banned either in Boston or elsewhere?

Nick Pell: Oh, some of my favorites are on here. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, James Joyce's Ulysses.

Jordan Harbinger: How are they banning books? Because and maybe I'm being naive here. Don't we just have a First Amendment that protects us from book bans and you can't really do anything about it?

Nick Pell: Before the Naked Lunch trial, there were all kinds of laws against obscenity. I believe there's still obscenity laws on the books today. And that people are occasionally prosecuted for them.

I don't think it's common, but dirty books are like, this is a thing that you could prosecute people for. So even during the Naked Lunch trial, the argument wasn't that you could publish anything you wanted. It was that this specific book had a redeeming social value.

There's still obscenity trials after, but this trial is the end of let's ban you Ulysses, let's ban books that adults read for the sake of reading literature. That's kind of the last gasp of that.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So why was this such a landmark case, the Naked Lunch thing?

Nick Pell: I think part of it was just changing social mores and the sexual revolution comes in and people are just less squeamish about a book featuring a steam powered dildo named Steely Dan.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. That's where that comes from. So I thought that was just the name of some lame band that Danny Tanner used to like on Full House.

Nick Pell: Oh man, I am not going to tolerate any Steely Dan slander in my presence. They're a great band, but yeah, their name does come from a steam powered metal dildo in Naked Lunch.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. Okay. So after the Naked Lunch trial, though, there are no instances of a book being put on trial.

That's just the end of the line.

Nick Pell: There's a couple important cases. The one that I want to talk about is Mike Diana. He is a man who was put on trial in Florida in 1994 for his underground comic zine, Boiled Angel.

I actually worked for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund right out of college who defended him at the time and they don't exist just to defend him. They're not the Mike Diana Legal Defense Fund. They're the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which implies the existence of other people who are having legal difficulties because of publishing comics, enough such to necessitate an entire fund for such.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. Okay. By the way, I looked up the obscenity law thing because I was like, oh, surely this isn't really a thing anymore.

Actually, we'll talk about more of this a little bit later, but people do go to prison for this. Everything that I'm finding though, that's not decades and decades old, like before I was born is porn related. Not just like this person has porn, but ooh, this is like non-consensual stuff or like looks really bad and is icky and abusive.

And it's like, even the names of the things, I won't say them here because I don't want to get like an explicit rating or whatever on this episode, but just the names of these things, the different sexual fetishes, and these guys went to prison for years, multiple years of a bunch of this for producing and distributing this stuff. And I don't know. I guess it really seems like it has to be quite extreme given what you can find on the internet, but this stuff sounds extreme.

Okay. So after the Naked Lunch trial, though, there is no instances of a book being put on trial. Because again, everything I'm finding is like video porn here.

So is that just the end of the line?

Nick Pell: More or less, but again, like Mike Diana in 1994, Boiled Angel.

Jordan Harbinger: Some people retire and take up gardening. Others spend their golden years checking school libraries for boners. Here's a healthier hobby.

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So what makes Boiled Angel different? Why was this guy being put on trial almost 30 years after the Naked Lunch trial? I mean, it sort of seems like Naked Lunch.

All right, we're done with this until the porn guys in 2012 or whatever it is. Why go after this dude for a comic book?

Nick Pell: First of all, Mike Diana wasn't trapped. A detective wrote him posing as a fan. Second of all, a lot of it boiled, no pun intended, down to the idea that comics are for kids, but they're not protected in the same way that the Naked Lunch is.

Jordan Harbinger: So was he acquitted then from all this or what?

Nick Pell: No, he was given a fine and community service. And beyond that, the judge forbade him from creating any art that could be considered obscene, even if he was just making it for himself.

He was subject to warrantless searches to ensure that he didn't have art materials or drawings. And finally he was forced to undergo a journalistic ethics class and a psychiatric evaluation at his own expense.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, that sucks. Did he ever get that overturned or anything?

Nick Pell: Nope.

He got one conviction overturned, but he is a convicted criminal to this day. The Supreme Court would not hear his case. And amazingly, astonishingly, I never see Boiled Angel on any of these displays of banned books.

Jordan Harbinger: And it seems a lot different than a small town in Arkansas deciding they don't want to have a certain book in the library or on the freshman English curriculum or whatever that might be.

Nick Pell: If you're like curious as to where my ax to grind against these displays come from, it's like people are actually prosecuted for owning books around the world, but not really in this country for the last 30 some odd years in the case of Mike Diana. And if you want to talk about quote unquote, serious literature, we're talking 60 years.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, fair. But I really get the sense that there's more going on here than the way that you're describing it. I heard about a law in Utah where if enough school districts remove a book, it had to be removed from every public school in the state or something along those lines.

And that seems like it's getting pretty close to banning a book, even if the book police aren't rounding people up and throwing them in the clink.

Nick Pell: I would say it certainly seems like government overreach anyway. I think it's kind of stupid that three counties or whatever the number is get to tell the entire state of Utah what their kids are allowed to read in the government schools. But again, you can go on Amazon and buy these books.

They're not banned.

Jordan Harbinger: What about state bills attempting to make librarians liable for letting kids borrow books that their parents don't want them to read? That seems super difficult.

Nick Pell: Okay. Now we're getting closer to banned books, but there's some nuance here. So it's true.

Some states have moved to make librarians prosecutable for children reading obscene literature. So what qualifies that as obscene? Community standards determine this for the most part.

It's vague, but I think most people would agree that there are books that kids shouldn't read.

Jordan Harbinger: You don't let your kid read Harry Potter, right? Was that it?

Nick Pell: My son is mercifully uninterested in Harry Potter. I can't think of any book he's ever asked to read that I haven't let him. I love Naked Lunch.

It's — my kid's nine years old and I don't want him reading Naked Lunch.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Should a librarian face prosecution for letting a nine-year-old check Naked Lunch out of the library?

Nick Pell: In my personal opinion, no.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Why not then, if you think it's not a book that kids should be reading?

Nick Pell: So basically we have laws against furnishing pornography to children.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that makes sense.

Nick Pell: And that's, I'm totally fine with that.

That's a totally fine law. Naked Lunch is not pornography. Specifically with Naked Lunch, this is going to go way over kids' heads.

I don't even know what kid is going to make it past the first page. But I also cannot envision a child who is going to check Naked Lunch out of the library to like sexually titillate or gratify themselves with, and it's up to parents to police what their kids are going to read and what their kids are not going to read.

Jordan Harbinger: But either way, at some point, a DA, a district attorney is going to have to decide to pick up a case and prosecute it. I just don't think there are many DAs in America who want to be the guy who decided to bring a librarian to court because they let someone's fifth grader read a Henry Miller novel. I don't know.

Conversely, I don't think many DAs are going to pass up a chance to prosecute the guy who has given out copies of Hustler to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. They might be upset about that.

Nick Pell: Worth noting though, that I could find a single example of a librarian facing prosecution in Florida where this law targeting, supposedly targeting librarians was passed. For better, for worse, this law became known as the don't say gay law, which we'll get more into the weeds on that law later, but sometimes laws are just drafted as deterrents to keep people from doing things. This law seems to be designed as a deterrent.

Jordan Harbinger: Where does the line get drawn?

Nick Pell: You're the lawyer. You should tell us.

Jordan Harbinger: I do know it's, but it's vague.

It's subjective, right? The famous line is, I know it when I see it, I know it when I see it. And so, okay.

It's a little bit clearer than that. So for anybody who doesn't know, Nick is referring, we are referring to how Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography. I know it when I see it.

And that actual ruling is not super specific, but it does give us some better guidelines than just Justice Stewart's personal opinion, thankfully. So first there's the average person standard. Would the average person applying contemporary community standards find that the work taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest?

Is it sexy? Yes. Then there's the patently offensive standard.

Does the work depict or describe in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law? Is it extra super sexy? Right again.

So the last one is the SLAP test. So it's the main test that I feel like they actually, you know, the clerks writing this were like, how do I come up with a funny acronym here? I think they should have called it the SPANK test, but that's just me.

Maybe that appealed to the prurient interest. This is the main test. The whole question hangs on: Does the work taken as a whole lack serious S, literary L, artistic, political, or scientific value? And the reason that this is a big one is that it's defined by negative. It says that if the book only exists to get someone all hot and bothered and offers nothing else, that's how we know it's pornography.

And it's not just a sexy book about particle physics or maritime law. So basically it carves out a giant loophole where a book can be sexy, but as long as it has some other redeeming quality, it's not porn, it's not pornography.

Nick Pell: No idea how Fifty Shades of Grey sneaks in under that. Also kind of like hilarious to me because this gets back to the whole thing about how the most load bearing word in Western law is reasonable. I know, I know.

It's really crazy. Reasonable is just doing heroic work in Western law, people.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I personally, I would say Fifty Shades slaps, legally speaking, but here we are. Yeah.

It spanks.

Nick Pell: Yeah, but that's the gist of it. That's why we don't have book bans in America anymore, other than Boiled Angel. There's another case that has nothing really to do with pornography and it's not a ban per se, but the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1997 that a book called Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, which is exactly what it sounded like, was not protected by the First Amendment.

So what happened there? People were not just reading it for what it is. They were using it for what it is.

It is a manual to commit contract murder and a guy who read it used the instructions to murder a woman named Mildred Horn, her eight-year-old disabled son, and a nurse in Maryland. He was hired by the eight-year-old disabled son's father.

Jordan Harbinger: Whoa, that is dark to say the least.

Holy moly.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I almost didn't want to mention it by name, but you have to.

I know I'm Streisand effecting this into like top 10 on Amazon right now, but the publisher, which is going to ring a lot of bells with a certain type of person here, the publisher, Paladin Press, agreed to a multimillion dollar payout before trial. They had all kinds of sketchy books about making explosives and getting revenge on people, but you can get all of those, and as far as I know, Hit Man, from Amazon or find them on the internet archive. And no one went to jail for publishing Hit Man, but the publisher, Paladin Press, they paid through the nose.

Jordan Harbinger: Man, I had tons of Paladin Press catalogs as a kid, and I would highlight all the ones I wanted, which is like everything, right? Uncle Ragnar's Dirty, Improvised Explosives Using Household Chemicals. Poor Man's James Bond.

The Anarchist Cookbook was like the basic one in there, but there was all this stuff like Rolling Thunder, how to modify your car to have like guns on it and like bulletproof the important parts and have things that you can use to like turn your car into some sort of Mad Max vehicle. And now as an adult, I'm like, who's writing all this stuff? The doomsday preppers for sure, but also just really creative, crazy people.

Nick Pell: A bunch of them were written by a guy named Kurt Saxon, who I was supposed to write a biography of, but it fell through because he's since passed, but he was alive at the time that I was like given the assignment to write his biography. They desperately wanted it written while he was still alive. And it involved driving to the city where he was in a nursing home, which is this like weird little city where the Klan is headquartered in Arkansas.

And I was like driving around the country in an RV with my two year old and my ex wife, and I was just like, yeah, I'm not going to the Klan town in Arkansas to knock on doors and ask if anybody knows Kurt Saxon. I'm going to end up in a ditch.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I can't say that I blame you for that. It makes me wonder, was the guy like ex special forces or just like, I can create a bunch of nonsense about how to make explosives and car weapons.

Was he just a creative thing? I'm curious about that. A lot of the stuff in Paladin Press books, I did get my hands on some of it.

A lot of it was just military manuals from like Vietnam and it was like booby traps and you're like, oh, that's cool. So you'd read it, look at it and be like, whoa, these are really scary and horrible. And then some of the bomb things, it was like, yeah, this sounds really dangerous.

And also, no, I can't mail order a bunch of pipettes and Bunsen burnery kind of things from this chemistry supply place without my parents finding out. So I guess we're done here. We're all set now.

But I did make a couple of bombs that didn't require that stuff, but that was like Drano bomb nonsense. That was just like, I guess I'm lucky I didn't go blind. No comment.

Yeah. No comment. What does the Supreme Court have to say about removing books from school libraries and stuff like that?

Do they ever chime in on this? I guess I don't keep up on my constitutional law cases anymore.

Nick Pell: Little versus Llano (is how I want to say that's pronounced) County more or less said that towns can do whatever they want in this regard. They refused to hear a case against the state of Texas about book removal.

And as you know, court refusing to hear a case is as good as upholding the lower court ruling. We have another case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of parents who wanted to opt their kids out of the LGBT education at their schools.

Again, books were not banned, but the Supreme Court did say that parents have a right to determine what their kids are reading and not reading in the government schools.

Jordan Harbinger: But why are other parents allowed to determine what my kids can and can't read in public schools?

Nick Pell: I would argue that they are kind of, no matter where you live, no one is teaching Boiled Angel at the elementary school.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's fair. But didn't the Department of Defense remove a bunch of books from military based schools and then there was probably another thing in Florida, right? Because the, didn't the state government tell a bunch of local schools and libraries what they could and couldn't have on hand?

Nick Pell: Yeah. So this is the don't say gay law as this was not what it was made out to be in any of that. So this is actually two laws, HB 1467 and HB 1069.

There's three main bones of contention here. None of which specifically ban any book, nor for that matter, do they tell anyone that they can't say the word gay. So first there's a media specialist mandate.

Every book in a school library now has to be approved by a state certified media specialist, whatever that is. I'm sure it's something to ensure that it is free of pornography and age appropriate.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm already having trouble with this, even if no books were banned.

Nick Pell: I'm kind of off as soon as I see state certified media specialist, but in any event, I'm not really a fan of state government telling the local governments in their state, what process they need to use to approve books, I think probably people in that community know better than people at the state house. That's my opinion. With that said, this is about school libraries.

This is not what books can and cannot be legally sold or read in the state of Florida. And so if you want your kid to read these books so bad, you can take them to the public library. You can buy it on Amazon.

Removing a book from a school library is not banning a book.

Jordan Harbinger: So we don't care about the school librarian's job. I mean, that's supposed to be their job, right? Curating all this stuff.

Nick Pell: I think that parents have decided that they just don't trust school librarians and want them to have more oversight. I don't think it's the best solution to it, but I think this is what this is born of is people don't like what's in their kids' libraries at school. And so the next thing in these laws is the open challenge provision, which says that any resident of a county, even those without kids in the school, can challenge the book.

While the challenge is being reviewed, the book is often pulled from the shelves.

Jordan Harbinger: Wait, so some busybody stale fart with nothing but time on their hands and no skin in the game is allowed to step in and try to get a book removed from a school library.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I'd say that's a fair description. In 2023, they drafted new fast track rules that established if a book is challenged for sexual content, it has to be removed within five days and stay gone until a final decision is made. Now we need to note that this is sexual conduct is what this refers to.

This is not telling your children that gay people exist. For example, if there was a section in a history book about the Stonewall Riot in, I believe it was 1969, that's not going to fall under this provision, it's sexual content. I was working as a, for a conservative news aggregator in 2020, when sexualized children's literature first became a hot button issue in the state of Virginia.

A lot of the material that the parents objected to was objectionable, like objectively. Objectively objectionable.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a lot of objects, but what specifically were in some of the books that parents were objecting to? And maybe you can keep it PG-13 so we don't get too far down whatever rabbit hole, I'm afraid to say the word hole now, I'd appreciate that.

Nick Pell: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe was a graphic novel. So there's pictures, right? But it's not just words.

There were illustrations of one character performing oral sex on another, who was wearing a strap-on dildo and instructions on how to use sex toys. And yeah, like people didn't want their kids reading this at school. Having a — Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison had graphic depictions of 10-year-olds having sex.

Jordan Harbinger: Yikes. Okay. Yeah.

I can see how somebody might think that's a little too spicy for the local public school. Honestly, it's sort of weird that stuff is even legal to have around kids, especially. I don't know.

That sounds porny to me. There's the ick factor there, big time.

Nick Pell: So circling back to Florida, Florida did clamp down on activists trying to game the system, which in my opinion is just, okay, we're going to patch this law that doesn't sound like it was the best idea, at least very well executed in the first place, non-parents and individuals without children enrolled in the specific school district are now legally restricted, they can't file more than one objection per calendar year.

This curbed mass filing campaigns by outside political or activist groups. The law also requires school boards to adopt local procedures to handle objections efficiently, which is again, like they're delegating this to local areas, which is, it sounds like how the law was before they had this statewide law in the first place. Ron DeSantis, the governor at the time pushed back against attempts to remove classic literature and dictionaries, but it doesn't sound like there was anything in the law that would prevent someone from doing that.

Jordan Harbinger: Apparently telling people they can't buy something is the best way to sell it. So whatever you do, do not use any of the following promo codes, especially you mom. We'll be right back.

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All right, back to the show. Removing classic literature and dictionaries is kind of ludicrous. It seems like the actual debate is over who gets to decide what kids read.

Teachers or parents or random people that don't have kids and are also not teachers, that's the weird one, right? Because then you just get some kook who's like, I don't think anybody should have, I don't know, images of people's faces in books because it's against my personal religion. And then they file 17,000 takedown requests using AI.

And it's like, no, we're not removing pictures of humans from books.

Nick Pell: No. And I think that's a fair analysis of it. Yeah.

Like I live in a small town where there's a woman, literally her job is law fairing the city and county government. It's what she does. She just files lawsuits, shakes them down for a settlement, and that's how she makes her living.

And yeah, like welcome to America where there's tons of people who have tons of free time to do nothing but harass the local government into submission. That's accurate. But on the flip side, if you desperately think your kid needs to see an illustrated guide to blowing a strap-on, you can get Gender Queer on Amazon for 10 bucks.

And if you don't have 10 bucks, you can find nine other parents who desperately want their kid to see the same and everyone can chip in a buck.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But there's also the question of history or other social studies books that are not graphic novels full of whatever smut being challenged because parents just don't like what the book has to say.

Nick Pell: I think that the entirety of written history is agenda driven and schools are simply choosing which agenda they're prioritizing when they teach kids. The separate thing about social studies in school, which again is like no one is banning these books. They're taking them out of school and replacing them with other books, other perspectives.

This is a debate about which perspective or perspectives that the government schools are going to teach. I think parents have a right to pass their values on to their children and if they object to the values they feel are being presented to their children in social studies, yes, I think that they have a responsibility to say something.

Jordan Harbinger: So you don't think there's any such thing? I know this is a weird term. You don't think there's any such thing as objective history?

Like there's not, hey, slavery happened. It happened between these years. Here's broadly what it was.

I know you can get into nuanced stuff because there's people that are like, they were better off when they were slaves, which is like a crazy take. But there's people that just go, we just don't want to talk about that. It's uncomfortable.

I don't like it. I don't want my kids to hear about it because it's icky. That's kind of a strange philosophy of education.

Nick Pell: I agree. And I'm unaware of any actual attempts to prevent children from learning that slavery existed in the United States. If you know otherwise, I'm happy to be educated.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm giving an extreme example. That's like part of the debate around this.

Nick Pell: I don't know of anyone who said, let's remove slavery from history books.

And people can correct me in the comments. I'm not prepared to talk about it, but I think that objectivity is a spectrum. And in the current political environment in this country and in the West in general, we're reduced to a very polarized binary and people don't want their kids learning the other side's version of things.

Jordan Harbinger: Sounds like you're arguing for non-binary, Nick.

Nick Pell: Yes, but there's just like everything's so polarized in this country right now. Do I think there's any such thing as objective history?

Not really. I think everything's written from a perspective and you have to incorporate that perspective into your analysis of a historical document, whether it's primary or secondary, but in the political environment in this country. Yeah.

I think it's basically like there's people who want you to hear that like your children are personally responsible for slavery and you have other people who want your children to learn that slavery was actually super good and they were like members of the family. First of all, I don't think either of those are accurate. Second of all, I understand why people who believe one don't want their kids to hear the other.

And I think that's like what this whole thing about social studies curriculum boils down to. Things are just so polarized and the kids aren't getting nuanced balance history. It doesn't seem like based on the admittedly little that I know about it, it seems like they get very politicized agenda driven versions of history, regardless of who is in charge of the state government, regardless of who is in charge of the curriculum, they're getting some version of a political tract in substitution for an education in history or social studies or civics or whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you feel like there's a moral panic behind the attempt to remove books from schools, whether it's banning them or not? It reminds me a little bit of that satanic panic kind of vibes where like there's tunnels under the school and it's like, oh, there's boogeymen in these books and there it's all a secret agenda to like reprogram your kids. I don't know.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I think that in a lot of cases, parents have reasonable objections. The strap-on blowjob thing.

Jordan Harbinger: At first when I heard about that, I looked it up because I thought, oh, that no way is this true, right?

No, it was like, oh no, there it is. Why is this in a book that's in a library at a school? I'm not saying don't publish this.

Like, that's fine, but why would this be in any library? I just don't understand it. That was so weird.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And like in that case, I worked for a conservative news aggregator. I've watched like hours of videos of parents reading from the books.

I've seen parents thrown out of school board meetings for reading from these books because of what it said in the book is considered too obscene because of the content of the book.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's too obscene for the school board meeting, but then the book is in the library. Yeah, that's crazy.

Nick Pell: And again, like if you want your kid to read this, like you can go buy it with your own money. I'm not even saying you shouldn't be allowed to show it to your kids. I'm saying it shouldn't be paid for with government tax dollars.

You can disagree, but you also shouldn't treat an objection to government tax dollars being spent on this book as if it's some crazy tunnels under McMartin daycare conspiracy theory. It's just not, are you at least able to create a theory of mind where somebody would not want their child to have unfettered access to this book or be required to read it?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. When I first heard about all this, I really assumed it was a bunch of like really super small townie conservative type people being like, there's a book where the kids have two dads and that's awful. There's some of that going on in the school that my kids go to where there's a parents group.

And some people were like, there's a book where this character has two dads and it was, oh my God, I don't want my kids reading that. And then somebody who definitely isn't me pointed out, like, what do you think about the actual kids in our school that have two dads? Do you want them to not be friends with those people?

And they were like, oh wait, we have that. And that was like kind of the end of the discussion. Because it was like, yeah, there are like multiple two father homes in our school.

And like, those guys are part of our community. And like, there's a book where the kid has two dads. I'm not saying the book has to stay or go, but if you're trying to protect your kids from that, you should just pull them out of the school entirely.

Because there's gay parents in the school and they're going to find out about that too early on. Why do you have two dads? Oh, they're gay.

What's that mean? They're going to find out. So I just assumed it was like that.

I didn't know it was like strap on BJ territory. That's a bit much. So I feel like there's almost a new kind of banned in Boston effect going on here.

Do we have any information on how banned books is working as a marketing gimmick? Aha.

Nick Pell: Yes. Now we get to the bottom of things. Recent studies found these are from 2024 to 2025, including a major report in Marketing Science found that when a book is banned, not really in a school district, its circulation in public libraries increases by an average of 12%.

That doesn't necessarily mean it translates to more sales, but it does get some more eyes on the book. With regard to Gender Queer, the book that we keep talking about.

Jordan Harbinger: The strap-on BJ book.

Nick Pell: Yes. Strap-on BJ book, author Maia Kobabe has openly crowed about how objections have raised the book's profile. So I don't think it's unreasonable to say that people are making money off this, even if we don't have hard evidence.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. This is the Naked Lunch, Barbra Streisand's Naked Lunch.

So yeah, people are definitely making money off this and presumably beyond the books, there's all the, you know, I read banned books, swag, tote bags, t-shirts, key chains, I'm, I doubt that's a billion dollar industry or anything, but if I were running media for a book publisher, I would be doing a ton of social media campaigns on BookTok or whatever every time one of my authors had something challenged, I'd be trying to get my books banned, make this a little racier, we want this on the shelf where all the banned books are. You want it to be on those lists.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Don't worry, Jordan. They're doing this.

There's books that are super old, A Clockwork Orange, for example, which I read in high school or The Bluest Eye, which like me and everyone else read in honors, freshman English, they do get spikes in sales because a school board says, Hey, maybe kids shouldn't be reading a dystopian novel about juvenile delinquency and someone on social media runs with it. And sometimes it doesn't go any further than that. There's just a debate around it.

And it's like, Oh, it's a banned book. Let's be banned. It's not, you can go down to Barnes and Noble and buy it.

We talked about the 12% spike in library circulation. Sometimes we do have verifiable examples of spikes in sales. So Art Spiegelman's Maus, which I've read, I assume you've read, I assume a lot of our readers have read.

It's a Holocaust graphic novel where the Jews are mice and the Polish are pigs and the Nazis are cats. This was challenged in Tennessee and Maus was number one on Amazon after being challenged. The book's 40 something years old at this point.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's a fantastic book. So that was one of the books I read when I was in Germany and funny story. The cover has like a cartoon swastika because it's a graphic novel, right?

And it's about the Holocaust. And so I ordered all of them like Maus, Maus II, whatever, you know, I can't remember what they were all called, but I ordered all of them because shipping stuff to Germany from Amazon was expensive and took forever. And it was going to come in this massive box.

So I ordered all of them. And you're not allowed to have swastikas on things in Germany, as many people probably know. And this book came through and it had some letter that was like, this is allowed for specific reasons.

I mean, it's been 30 years, so I don't remember exactly what it said, but basically customs was like, yeah, you're studying this, right? It came with a bunch of other English books, so we're going to let it in. And it didn't go unnoticed.

They opened that and they were like, whoa, swastika, okay. I'm sure they have Maus in Germany, but I'm also very sure the cover is different. It's got to be.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Well, the band Kiss has a different logo in Germany because of the SS at the end of it, which is like extra funny because Gene Simmons is Israeli. Israeli Jewish.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, exactly. Yes. That's funny.

I didn't even think about that one. So going to number one on Amazon after being challenged, that's the banned in Boston effect. It comes across as somehow dangerous because some adult didn't want a kid to read it and then suddenly everybody's trying to read it.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I was deeply troubled when, during what I call the madness of 2020 to 2021, and like all of a sudden everything made prior to 10 minutes ago was declared to be racist and we needed to reevaluate like this whole thing that happened. 2020, '21, tons of books were removed from Amazon.

Or publishers were scared into taking books off shelves. This is to me is far more troubling than a school board in Loudoun County deciding that a book shouldn't be on the curriculum. Because if you take it off Amazon, it's good luck even getting it published.

Because it's like the whole California textbooks thing. The biggest market for books isn't selling your book. So an example of this is you could still buy John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility on Amazon.

But it's over 150 bucks because it's not in print. Publishers don't want to touch it.

Jordan Harbinger: What is that? I've never heard of that probably because it's not in print and publishers don't want to touch it.

Nick Pell: It's a sociology book arguing that the difficulties of Jewish assimilation into European society helped shape the ideas of three writers in particular, Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss. And Cuddihy reads their theories partly as responses to the pressures of fitting in with respectable Gentile society. So, you know, like Freud is mad that he has to use cutlery.

So he accuses people of wanting to bang their mom.

Jordan Harbinger: So he's examining how their backgrounds influenced ideas presented as universal explanations of humanity.

Nick Pell: Particular to the European Jewry. And it's provocative and you can dispute it. But I would like people to be able to read the book and decide for themselves what they think about his arguments instead of paying rare book prices for.

I mean, it wasn't mentioned on the antisemitism episode because this is not an example of intellectual antisemitism in my opinion, I think it falls well within the realm of fair scholarship about the European Jewry. It does not mean I agree with its conclusions, but it's not demonizing Jewish people. It's not saying all Jewish people are like this.

It's specifically talking about three guys and more to the point. Yeah. People should be able to read it and make up their own minds without paying 150 bucks for it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Another example of a book not being banned, but come on, who are we kidding here is The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. For anyone under the age of 40, this is a book that allegedly reportedly offended Muslims.

So I guess some Muslims, many Muslims. So the Ayatollah of Iran put a death sentence on the head of its author and it was truly banned as an illegal to import or sell in dozens of countries, including India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. And if you owned that book in those places, you were going to jail or worse.

People firebomb stores over this in the United States. Yeah. And he basically went into hiding for a decade.

I don't know what that exactly means, but I guess, yeah, he probably just chilled out and didn't talk to most people and didn't have an online presence or anything.

Nick Pell: Yeah. When the Iranian government so graciously decided that they wouldn't support or prevent someone from trying to kill him, that's when he finally came out of hiding.

Jordan Harbinger: And then some dude stabbed him a bunch of times when he gave a talk.

Nick Pell: 15 times, not in Riyadh, in Western New York, where Rushdie was giving a lecture on how great it is that America is a safe haven for writers.

Jordan Harbinger: Oof. Yeah.

He lived. And did the guy who stabbed him have beef with him over The Satanic Verses or was he just a kooky, nutty weirdo?

Nick Pell: He expressly did it because he felt that Rushdie insulted Islam.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Okay. No surprise there.

So by the way, he lost sight in his right eye because the knife reached the optic nerve. He's lucky that's all that happened. The knife punctured his liver.

He suffered severed nerves in his left hand, which he only partially recovered use of and three stab wounds to the neck, which is, that sounds like something that should have killed him. So wow. Holy smokes.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And like, this is by the way, like, why do you care so deeply about this, Nick? This is why I care so deeply about this.

Because like the world's most popular book and film franchise, Harry Potter does not belong on a banned bookshelves. The Satanic Verses? Yes, absolutely.

This guy was almost killed for writing this book. There was a decades long campaign to have him murdered for writing this book. And it does.

It makes me angry that people want to posture as dangerous outlaws because they're reading The Handmaid's Tale. Yeah. There was like what, like a six season long television series based on it.

This is not a banned book. There are actually banned books in the world. There are people sitting in prison for having books in the world.

There are people who have been stabbed in the eye because they wrote a book. And those people are the heroes, not J.K. Rowling for writing Harry Potter or you for reading it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So has the scale of book challenges ramped up though? Maybe that's what people are concerned about because if you turn on, I don't know, MS NOW or you're at the airport watching that and you see a story about how the sky is falling and books are being banned everywhere, I can see how that would trouble some people.

Nick Pell: Worse than that is social media. You know, I have no idea how many people just read headlines and go with it, but it's a lot, so for better, for worse, X is where Twitter, X is where a lot of people get their news from. I get my news mostly from X and the algorithm on X is designed to make you mad, which is why everyone is convinced that X boosts whatever side they're not on, but to your point about are there more challenges, like maybe possibly, I would say probably because of the way that X is Uber for outrage mobs.

But again, no one is shooting at Maia Kobabe. She does not have to go into hiding over the dildo BJ book. She goes out and goes, this is great for my book.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. I see what you're saying here. So there's tons of data showing that people are more likely to use social media if they're being outraged.

I think we've done shows about that too. So I know people can tunnel off though, right? Not everyone's on X.

Maybe people go to, what is it? Truth Social. What's the other one?

Threads, Bluesky.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Bluesky is like the liberal one and Truth Social is like the one Trump owns and Threads is like a weird alternative universe that I only see when Instagram baits me into clicking it. You can pick and choose your lane, but that's the thing is like you tunnel off into these competing versions of reality, I guess is what you would call it.

And yeah, I'm sure that there's people on Bluesky who think Donald Trump has a children's book Gestapo, who's running around taking flamethrowers to piles of books.

Jordan Harbinger: Funny, but what's the story with increased challenges? What kind of broader context do the current challenges to books exist in? What's going on with this?

Because it, it seems like this could spiral into something crazy if enough people decide to challenge all these books.

Nick Pell: We could go back a bit in time. You mentioned way earlier about the government banning books during the fifties and there's some kind of grain of truth to that in the fifties. During the McCarthy era, people see this as a period of censorship in America, but honestly, mostly happened overseas.

Librarians pulled 30 different authors because they were afraid of McCarthy's aides, Roy Cohn and David Schine. And these books were by Dashiell Hammett, Langston Hughes, Upton Sinclair. We have 10 confirmed cases of book burnings during this period, but these are librarians burning books to hide evidence and they happened overseas, not in the United States.

Now, again, for context, I know that there was like churches banning Harry Potter in the nineties or whatever, but come knock on my door when librarians are burning books because they don't want to go to jail, come knock on my door when the mayor hosts a rally in the town square where he invites people to burn books, whether or not it's legal or not, legal mandate, meaning like whether or not the state is banning books, the second that like the mayor is holding a rally to burn books in the town square, I'm going to be concerned about that.

Jordan Harbinger: Does it have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value? Bruh, I'm just trying to sell you some pants. We'll be right back.

Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our sponsors keeps us going. All of the deals and discounts are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. I see. That's weird that Europe was just removing books from their libraries because they were afraid of a couple of American Senate aides.

What the heck is that?

Nick Pell: The thing is, it wasn't even privately funded libraries. It was specifically the United States Information Service Libraries, which is like a military thing. This was not Fahrenheit 451, which by the way, you should go read that because it's actually more relevant than you think it is if you haven't read it.

It's not bad. And it's also like, it's about people getting too stupid to read. Books are banned because they bum people out because they can't read them.

In Indiana, a member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, during the same time period, demanded the removal of Robin Hood from school books because his philosophy of robbing the rich to give to the poor was the communist line.

Jordan Harbinger: Did anyone actually do that? That's crazy.

Nick Pell: School boards across Indiana began quietly choosing textbooks that didn't talk about Robin Hood, which by the way, is about a guy robbing tax collectors and giving money back to the people who paid the taxes.

Jordan Harbinger: What about during the civil rights era? Were there banned books at that time? It seems like the timing was ripe for that back then.

Nick Pell: There's some attempts to remove books that preach racial tolerance. There are some attempts to remove books like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, where people use racial slurs. But again, like the broader context of the civil rights era is in a post-Naked Lunch world for the most part, overlaps quite well with just the decline of these kinds of challenges, lawsuits, prosecutions, anyway, then you've got the satanic panic era of the eighties, which you mentioned earlier, everyone's terrified of Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal and horror movies.

Jordan Harbinger: But school libraries don't have Dungeons and Dragons manuals and heavy metal records for the most part, I assume anyway. Only the cool ones.

Nick Pell: Island Trees versus Pico from 1982 is a pivotal case to come out of this era. And really speaks to the core of this in many ways. The Supreme Court ruled that a New York school board could not remove books like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five because it and other books like it were allegedly anti-Christian or anti-American.

Libraries are not required to buy any book, but they cannot remove books simply for the ideas contained in the book.

Jordan Harbinger: So how are people able to challenge books about gender and sexuality then?

Nick Pell: I think the basic argument is that some parents want to remove the books because they're not appropriate for children, not necessarily because they're opposed to the ideas in them.

Jordan Harbinger: I think at least in some cases, they're very clearly opposed to the ideas in the book.

Nick Pell: Sure, but it's not a basis for removing them. And in much of life, there's a difference between the good reason and the real reason.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Remember, so all the panic about Harry Potter. I mean, you mentioned it a couple of times.

That's kind of this weird aftershock of satanic panic. How prevalent was the removal of Harry Potter? Because I remember hearing that in the news, but I remember at the time even thinking like, okay, so some crazy churches where, you know, the Westboro Baptist Church or something doesn't let the family read Harry Potter.

Who cares? What else is new?

Nick Pell: Yeah, it was the most challenged work of the entire decade from 2000 to 2009. Didn't really seem to impact sales, negatively anyway. There was a church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where they held a literal book burning and this became the defining image of Harry Potter is banned.

But it was a, it was a private event. It has no legal power over the public library or the schools in town or anything. In Jacksonville, a state library was sued for giving out wizard certificates who finished the fourth book.

The library eventually stopped the program because they wanted to avoid a long legal battle. Um, a parent took the case all the way to the Florida State Board of Education to have the books removed for promoting Wicca. She lost, but there was years of legal drama, kept the book in the headlines.

Jordan Harbinger: So there are no examples of the Harry Potter series actually being banned anywhere for real?

Nick Pell: There was a town in Arkansas that required parental permission to take it out of the library. Counts versus Cedarville School District ruled that that was unconstitutional. A private Catholic school removed the book from its library, but they're private and they can do what they want.

Meanwhile, it's one of the best selling book and film series of the 21st century.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm guessing this is an example of banned in Boston being a sales driver. Harry Potter was everywhere in the nineties, two thousands, whatever. Is there any evidence that bans drove sales?

I mean, I don't even think it needed that.

Nick Pell: No, I wasn't able to find any specific evidence that showed that it increased sales.

Jordan Harbinger: I can see how maybe the controversy around the book made it more interesting to adults. It's a kid's book, but a lot of adults were reading it for sure. And I'd wager that a good part of that was them wanting to see what all the fuss was about.

The irony is maybe that the people who wanted it banned 25 years ago, those people are probably the biggest defenders of J.K. Rowling today because of her controversial comments about, was it transgender people or something like that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And I think that this gets to the heart of a lot of the issue, what people do and don't want banned or removed or whatever the case may be hinges a lot on the basis of the political polarization that we, I talked about earlier.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I can see the argument against putting highly sexualized content in school libraries, depending on the age of the kids using it or reading it. But this is part of the job of school librarians, right?

To curate a book collection relevant and appropriate for their audience.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And I think that's a real and valid debate. What is appropriate for kids?

Should Naked Lunch be in an elementary school library? I don't think so. Middle school, maybe high school, maybe again, like I'm fine with community standards dictating this.

But I also think that especially in the age of Amazon or Internet Archive, an enterprising teenager is going to be able to read Naked Lunch if they really want it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And they've already seen worse on every sort of adult website anyway, so whatever. I can see why parents would maybe not want their kids reading about Steely Dan.

Nick Pell: The dildo or the band?

Jordan Harbinger: Both, obviously. Yeah.

Nick Pell: Ooh. Yeah. But then you start talking about stuff like Dr. Seuss's publisher removed six of his books from circulation during the madness of 2020 and 2021.

Jordan Harbinger: Really? I don't really remember this. So what was that all about?

Why would Dr. Seuss books have to go?

Nick Pell: There's racially insensitive drawings in the books. Like I can specifically remember there's like, you know, a Chinese guy who's like one of 50 people on the page and he's got his little hat and his long mustache and whatever. Publishers stopped printing and licensing six books, one of which is my personal favorite Dr. Seuss book. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, excellent book, whether you have children or not.

Jordan Harbinger: I love the idea of people panic buying Green Eggs and Ham as if that's going to be next on the list. It's just, I guess racially insensitive drawings. There probably are some cartoonish things in there, but removing the book, I don't know, it's an old book, whatever.

Nick Pell: Yeah. There is like kind of a weird left-wing analog to parents who are like, I don't want my kid learning that some kids have two dads thing. I don't want my kid learning that people had a different view of the world 70 years ago or that different things were acceptable.

This is kind of attempt to like year zero everything, which is that I think drove a lot of stuff during what I'm calling the madness was this kind of attempt to like year zero everything and cut people off from past, but in fairness, probably more than, than maybe I've given them credit for so far in this episode. I think that librarians can tend to be a voice of sanity and they definitely were during the, during the Dr. Seuss controversy, a bunch of libraries refused to remove the books. My kid was like three or four when this happened.

And I just told them like, people want to make it so that you're not allowed to read this book and I think it's a good book. So we're going to read it anyway, which — he was four, I don't know how much of it sank in, but to me it was like, this is a good opportunity to have an age appropriate conversation with my son about censorship.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I feel like there were a lot of arguments around this time about removing books. And on the one hand, the left wanted to remove or edit books that like you said, they were deemed racially insensitive or outside the cultural norms of the day, of modern day.

And then on the right, yeah, there was a kind of counter-reformation where they wanted to remove books, some of which were critical of America's past.

Nick Pell: They edited Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to remove words like fat and ugly, huh? It had previously been edited because the Oompa Loompas were originally caricatures of tribal Africans.

Jordan Harbinger: I didn't know that. Okay. They must've done that before the movie came out because those guys were like spray tan orange.

Nick Pell: Yeah. The punchline to all this is that Roald Dahl, raging anti-Semite. His book, The Witches is like the Fisher-Price My First Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. Really? I didn't know that.

I knew he was an anti-Semite because I remember like as a kid, oh Roald Dahl, he's so great. He's so great. And then when you're an adult, you're like, oh, he just really hated Jews.

That's weird. And I thought, oh, is that true? That's going to be one of those like, oh, Phil Collins doesn't like Jews and you Google it and there's no evidence.

No. That's like in his Wikipedia, it's like his legacy has been tarnished by the fact that he was a raging anti-Semite and said all kinds of horrific things. His publisher would rather everyone forget about.

Nick Pell: Yeah. It's too late into the episode to like get too deep into this, but The Witches is really bad. Like The Witches have a money printing machine and they're like ritualistically murdering children and...

Jordan Harbinger: What do you think of the people who are uncomfortable with stuff like that? The changing mores about race and sex over the years.

Nick Pell: Kind of the same as everything else, community standards, parents in control. I would say that I'm definitely against rewriting books because books are wonderful documents that we have of how people view the world around them in the past. And we have to, if we want to understand the past, we have to at some point view it through the eyes of the people who live through it.

But if parents don't want their children reading Huckleberry Finn, that's their business, not mine.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I remember that whole debate when I was in high school. It's like, Ooh, there's a lot of N-words in here.

And it's like, yeah, like the point is that people talk like that and they weren't censoring it for him. They weren't trying to be polite and that's part of the story. And if you change it, it's not going to have the same impact.

I guess historically censorship was about erasure, right? Literally removing a text from existence. So people couldn't access the ideas within it.

But in our digital high-speed economy, that's almost impossible. So instead, the book ban has evolved into a powerful signal within the attention economy. From a business perspective, the results are undeniable.

Publishers and retailers have learned that controversy is the ultimate accelerant for sales. A book that might've had a modest print run of 5,000 copies can become a national bestseller the moment it hits a restricted list. Nick, I'm thinking of, you're definitely going to remember this.

Remember Tucker Max and how his blog went crazy because people were like, you've got to read this. And then it was like, oh, we're going to publish a book. And then he did.

And it got, it was just enormous because one, he promoted it on his blog. But two, people were like, you can't read this. I remember there were protests.

So Ryan Holiday, who's been on the show like 10 times or something, he did some of the marketing for this. And one of the things he did, this is, I'm going off memory here. I think this is in his ancient book, Trust Me, I'm Lying. He bought billboards and was like, don't allow Tucker Max's book on your campus or don't allow Tucker Max to come speak on your campus. And that worked really well because all these groups were like, he's terrible.

He's a terrible person. So of course all the frat bros are like, who's this terrible person that all the activists don't want us to know about? Oh, it's Tucker Max.

Oh yeah. I heard of that guy. He's like a blog or something.

Yeah. He's got a book coming out that we're not supposed to read because it's terrible. Oh great.

When does it come out? And there were like lines to go buy this book, right? And immediate reprint.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Which is like a super old marketing technique. Like I just recently watched the film Matinee with my kid, which is the director, Joe Dante's love letter to fifties, sixties monster movies.

And there's this character played by the wonderful actor, Dick Miller, who is protesting the film. And the kid's like, wait, he was in one of this guy's movies. And it's yeah.

He's being paid to protest this, to get eyes on it. And that's not like a cool, fun little piece of fiction that he came up with. People used to do that.

David F. Friedman, who was like the biggest exploitation film producer of all time, talks about this. Yeah.

Like we, we would repackage Reefer Madness under a different name every three months, bring it to the same town and pay the, the local, create some like, you know, Indianans for moral decency and have them stand outside and protest because then people go, well, what's this, I want to go see this now. So it's a time tested way of getting eyes on something, whether or not the specific books that we're talking about are like mounting these kinds of campaigns.

I don't know who's to say, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were.

Jordan Harbinger: So really, as we look at these headlines, it's worth asking, are we actually protecting children or are we fueling a feedback loop that benefits the bottom line more than the classroom? So understanding these incentives doesn't mean the underlying issues aren't important, but it does mean we need to be skeptical of how the word banned is being used to move units here in 2026. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us read between the lines and thanks to you all for listening.

Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

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