Perhaps you have heard: the book banners are at it again.
One of the biggest narratives of the summer, if not the entire year, goes something like this: all across America, and particularly in deplorable redneck enclaves like [checks notes] the entire state of Florida, precious books are being torn wholesale from the hands of innocent schoolchildren. The reporting makes clear that we should understand this as the literary equivalent of a hate crime — many of the targeted books contain either LGBT or racial themes (subtext: for exactly the reasons you think) — and the perpetrators as a cabal of puritanical bigots dressed up as PTA moms. Fascism is on its way to a library near you, buried in the belly of a Trojan horse known as the "parents' rights movement."
Alas, here our aspiring culture warrior encounters a problem, as the villain he's so desperate to battle doesn't actually exist. And the book banning epidemic gripping the country, which has spawned hundreds of headlines, thousands of tweets, and an open letter from former President Barack Obama?
Yeah, also not real.
It's hard to overstate how bad the coverage of this issue has been, and how misleading. This article is an attempt to illuminate what's missing from the conversation, and how the fight about "banned books" acts as a smokescreen for the actual issue at hand: an existential power struggle to politicize the few remaining ideologically neutral spaces in the country.
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