1411: Banned Books | Skeptical Sunday

On this Skeptical Sunday, Nick Pell reads between the lines of banned book lists to show how outrage moves units — and what real censorship looks like. Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1411 https://jordanharbinger.com/1411 On This Week's Skeptical Sunday: Why most so-called banned books aren’t banned at all — they’ve been challenged, moved to another shelf, or pulled from a school, yet remain on Amazon. No US book has faced a legality trial since Naked Lunch in 1966, while the Bible is outlawed in nearly 60 countries. How underground cartoonist Mike Diana became a rare modern exception: convicted in Florida in 1994 over his comic zine Boiled Angel, barred from drawing anything obscene even for himself, and subjected to warrantless searches — yet his work never appears on banned-book displays. Why the real fight is over who decides what kids read: Florida’s laws let residents without kids challenge school library books, which are often pulled during review, while the Supreme Court’s Pico ruling says schools can’t remove books simply for the ideas they contain. How the old banned in Boston effect still sells books: a challenge lifts a title’s public library circulation by about 12%, Maus hit #1 on Amazon after being challenged in Tennessee, and marketers have long staged protests to make readers crave forbidden fruit. How to read between the lines: check whether a banned book is actually unavailable, save your outrage for real censorship like the death threats against Salman Rushdie, read troubling books to understand and counter their ideas, and turn controversies into age-appropriate talks with kids. Connect with Jordan on Twitter https://twitter.com/JordanHarbinger, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jordanharbinger, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/THEJORDANHARBINGERSHOW. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and let him know! And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deals/: Sequencing: 10% off: sequencing.com, code JHS https://sequencing.com/ConciergeMD: 20% off all services/memberships: conciergemdla.com/jordan, code JORDAN https://conciergemdla.com/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Jordan&utm_campaign=JordanHarbinger+FlyKitt: 15% off: flykitt.com, code JORDAN https://flykitt.com/The Cybersecurity Tapes: Listen here: thecybersecuritytapes.com https://thecybersecuritytapes.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:29Speaker 00

  Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker. And during the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks. From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. On Sundays, though, it's Skeptical Sunday. A rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic. Such as circumcision, astrology, recycling, toothpaste, crystal healing, diet pills, and more. And if you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs.

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  These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit JordanHarbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. If you've been in a bookstore over the last several years, you've probably seen an exhibit of allegedly banned books. Or maybe you were at the farmer's market and you saw someone holding a tote bag proudly boasting, "I read banned books." Perhaps you followed the controversy in Florida of the state government supposedly banning books. 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.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, the books are so banned 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 gonna burst in at any second and start arresting people for reading Harry Potter.

• 3:32Speaker 00

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

• 3:38Speaker 02

  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 gonna argue that removal of a book in most cases is not a ban.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  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?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Okay, which you think is not the same thing as actually banning the book.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  How do you restrict the Communist Manifesto?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  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?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  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 where 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.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes sense, right? So if you're in a college class studying World War II, 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.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Isn't this a good idea? Yeah, you can't do that.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  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 horrible.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Not a very good painter either, by the way.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  No. And yeah, 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.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I 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's 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.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:05Speaker 00

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

• 9:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  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. It 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, okay, all right, can't unsee most of that. Next, what's next on the list?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  It used to have a Streisand effect in this country.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  I see.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  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, whoa, it's banned in Boston. I gotta read that.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  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?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Wait, how can that be true?

• 12:37Speaker 02

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

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Oh my God.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  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 twenties. There's a weird kind of complication because now it has broadly liberal politics. That wasn't even necessarily true as growing up, but it's certainly not true everywhere today. But so politically liberal, sure, but I would say at least when I've been 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

• 13:27Speaker 02

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

• 13:41Speaker 00

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

• 13:46Speaker 02

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

• 13:54Speaker 00

  How were 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?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  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 Ulysses, let's ban books that adults read for the sake of reading literature.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  That's kind of the last gasp of that.

• 14:49Speaker 00

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

• 14:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  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?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Oh man, I am not going to tolerate any Steely Dan slander in my presence. They're

• 15:22Speaker 00

  All right.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  great band. But yeah, their name does come from a, a steam powered metal dildo in Naked Lunch.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  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?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  There's a couple important cases. The one that I want to talk about is Mike Deanna. 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 Deanna Legal Defense Fund.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  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

• 16:59Speaker 00

  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. Cause again, everything I'm finding is like video porn here. So is that just the end of the line?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  More or less, but again, like Mike Deanna in 1994, Boiled Angel.

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• 20:17Speaker 00

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

• 20:31Speaker 02

  First of all, Mike Deanna 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. They're not protected in the same way that the Naked Lunch is.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  So was he acquitted then from all this, or what?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:22Speaker 00

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

• 21:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  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 Deanna. And if you want to talk about quote unquote, "serious" literature, we're talking 60 years.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Wow, 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.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Okay, well, 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.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  So what qualifies then as obscene?

• 23:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:27Speaker 00

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

• 23:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, should a librarian face prosecution for letting a nine-year-old check Naked Lunch out of the library?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  In my personal opinion, no.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Okay, why not then, if you think it's not a book that kids should be reading?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  So basically, we have laws against furnishing pornography to children.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Worth noting, though, that I couldn't find a single example of a librarian facing prosecution in Florida, where this law targeting, supposedly targeting librarians, was passed. For better or 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.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Where does the line get drawn?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  You're the lawyer, you should tell us.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  I do know it's, but it's vague, it's subjective, right? The famous line is, "I know it when I see it."

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I know it when I say it.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Is it sexy?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  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?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Is it extra super sexy?

• 26:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  I know, I know, it's really crazy.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Reasonable is just doing heroic work in Western law, people.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Yes, I, personally, I would say Fifty Shades slaps, legally speaking. But here we are, yeah, it spanks.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  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 Hitman, A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, which is exactly what it sounds like, was not protected by the First Amendment.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  So what happened there?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Whoa, that is dark, to say the least. Holy moly.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I almost didn't want to mention it by name, but you have to. I know I'm Streisand affecting 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, Hitman, from Amazon, or find them on the internet archive. And no one went to jail for publishing Hitman, but the publisher, Paladin Press, they paid through the nose.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Man, I had tons of Paladin Press catalogs as a kid, and I would highlight all the ones I wanted, which was like everything, right? Uncle Ragnar's dirty improvised explosives using household chemicals.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Poor man's James Bond.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  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 is writing all this stuff? The doomsday preppers for sure, but also just really creative, crazy people.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  I'm going to end up in a ditch.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't say that I blame you for that. It makes me wonder, was the guy like ex-special forces or something? Or just like, I can create a bunch of nonsense about how to make explosives and car weapons? Was he just a creative thing? Like, 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 buns and 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.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  But that was like Drano bomb nonsense. That was just like, I guess I'm lucky I didn't go blind.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  No comment.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  No comment.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Little versus Yano 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.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Okay, but why are other parents allowed to determine what my kids can and can't read in public schools?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  I would argue that they are kind of, no matter where you live. No one is teaching boiled angel at the elementary school.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  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 didn't the state government tell a bunch of local schools and libraries what they could and couldn't have on hand?

• 33:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:54Speaker 00

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

• 33:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  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?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  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 bored 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.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  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?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say that's a fair description. In 2023, they drafted new fast-track rules that establish 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. Or 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.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Objectively objectionable. 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.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Gender Queer by Maya 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 Everson had graphic depictions of 10-year-olds having sex.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  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 an X factor there, big time.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  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, they're delegating this to local areas, which is, it sounds like how

• 38:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored in part by FlyKit. FlyKit has become a must for every international trip we take. It's a jet lag kit designed to help your body adjust to a new time zone faster so you can spend less of your trip feeling exhausted and more of it actually enjoying where you are. Me and Jen have used it on dozens of international trips at this point. We always keep it stocked at home. Whenever another international trip comes up, it's one of the things we don't even have to think about. It's coming with us. FlyKit works with an app that creates a personalized jet lag plan based on your exact flights with time zone changes. It tells you when to take these included supplements, when to get light, when to get caffeine, when to wear the blue light blocking glasses, take a nap, sleep, whatever. You just enter your itinerary and you follow the schedule before, during, and after your flight. It's really easy to use. It just takes the guesswork out of managing jet lag and helps you adjust so you can actually

• 39:41Speaker 00

  arrive feeling more like yourself. When you've traveled halfway around the world, you don't want to lose the first few days to jet lag and be zombified the first week of your trip. That's why FlyKit is part of our international travel routine. Also, it helps you get back to work after your trip. But yeah, that's not as fun. Go to flykitwithtwoT's.com and use code JORDAN for 15% off. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and AMD. Cybersecurity threats keep evolving, but is your business prepared for what comes next? October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an opportunity to look beyond day-to-day security operations and ask bigger questions about how your organization protects its data, its infrastructure, and its ability to keep doing business. The Cybersecurity Tapes brings these questions to life, blending fictional cyber attacks

• 40:24Speaker 00

  with practical perspectives from real experts to make complex security challenges easier to understand. As AI moves from models to autonomous agents, securing it requires careful consideration from the start. Explore how securing AI agents, sovereign AI, and AI governance fit into that effort and how AI itself can help strengthen cybersecurity. Effective protection also means connecting security operations to measurable business outcomes. How do you talk to your board about cybersecurity? And how can those conversations help leaders understand whether the business is truly protected? When an attack happens, resilience becomes essential. It's not just about safeguarding data, it's about ensuring the infrastructure your business depends on can recover quickly and keep running. And as quantum computing advances, preparing for tomorrow's threats means understanding

• 41:07Speaker 00

  the risks today, prioritizing readiness, and building defenses that can adapt as encryption requirements change. This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, tune into what's next. Visit dell.com/cybersecuritymonth to learn how to protect your business and subscribe to the Cybersecurity Tapes to explore the threats, strategies, and ideas shaping cybersecurity. Come join us on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Lot of discussions going on in there, especially about Feedback Friday and Skeptical Sunday. That's on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. All right, back to the show.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  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 lawfare-ing 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,

• 42:50Speaker 02

  you can find nine other parents who desperately want their kid to see the same, and everyone can chip in a buck.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Okay, 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.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  No, I'm giving an extreme example.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  That's like part of the debate around this. 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.

• 45:02Speaker 00

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

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Yes, no, 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.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  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, balanced 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.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  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 it's all a secret agenda to like reprogram your kids. I don't know.

• 46:44Speaker 02

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

• 46:52Speaker 00

  At first, when I heard about that, I looked it up because I thought, oh, that can't.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  No way is this true, right?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Right, and then 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.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Because of what it said in the book is considered too obscene?

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Because of the content of the book.

• 47:26Speaker 00

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

• 47:31Speaker 02

  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?

• 48:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I first heard about all this, I really assumed it was a bunch of like, really super small-towny 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 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.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  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 ban books is working as a marketing gimmick?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Ah, 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.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  The strap-on BJ book, yes.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Strap-on BJ book. Author Maya Koberbe 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.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  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, keychains. 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 book TikTok or whatever, book talk, 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.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't worry, Jordan, they're doing this. There's books that are super old. 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 banned book. It's big 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 Mouse, which I've read, I assume you've read.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  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 Mouse was number one on Amazon. After being challenged, the book's 40 something years old at this point.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  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 Mouse, Mouse Two, 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.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  And it didn't go unnoticed. They opened that and they were like, whoa, swastika, huh? Okay. I'm sure they have Mouse in Germany, but I'm also very sure the cover is different. It's gotta be.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the banned 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.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Israeli Jewish, yes, exactly.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  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 revalue 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.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  The biggest market for books isn't selling your book. So an example of this is you could still buy John Murray Cudahy'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.

• 54:11Speaker 00

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

• 54:16Speaker 02

  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 Levi Strauss. And Cudahy 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 Cottleray. So he accuses people of wanting to bang their mom.

• 54:48Speaker 00

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

• 54:55Speaker 02

  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. This 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.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  People firebomb stores over this in the United States.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:33Speaker 00

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

• 56:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  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?

• 56:56Speaker 02

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

• 57:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  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 Maya Kabe. She does not have to go into hiding over the dildo BJ book.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  She goes out and goes, is this great for my book?

• 59:28Speaker 00

  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, Blue Sky?

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Blue Sky 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 Blue Sky who think Donald Trump has a children's book, Gestapo, who's running around taking flamethrowers to piles of books.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

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

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  We could go back a bit in time. You mentioned way earlier about the government banning books during the 50s. And there's some kind of grain of truth to that. In the 50s, during the McCarthy era, people see this as a period of censorship in America. But honestly, it mostly happened overseas. Librarians pulled 30 different authors because they were afraid of McCarthy's aides, Roy Cohn and David Shine. And these books were by Dashiell Hammond, Lex and Hughes, Upton Sinclair. We have 10 confirmed cases of book burnings during this period, but these are librarians burning books to hide evidence. And it happened overseas, not in the United States.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Now, again, for context, I know that there was like churches banning Harry Potter in the 90s 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.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  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.

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• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  I see. It'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?

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  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 banned, 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 schoolbooks because his philosophy of robbing the rich to give to the poor was the communist line.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Did anyone actually do that? That's crazy.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  There's some attempts to remove books that preach racial tolerance. There are some attempts to remove books like Huckleberry Finn and Call of 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 80s, which you mentioned earlier. Everyone's terrified of Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal and horror movies.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, but school libraries don't have Dungeons and Dragons manuals and heavy metal records for the most part, I assume, anyway?

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Only the cool ones. 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.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  So how are people able to challenge books about gender and sexuality, then?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

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

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  Yes, 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, 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

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  battle.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

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

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm guessing this is an example of banned in Boston being a sales driver. Harry Potter was everywhere in the 90s, 2000s, whatever. Is there any evidence that bans drove sale? I mean, I don't even think it needed that.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  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 JK Rowling today because of her controversial comments about, what was it, transgender people, something like that?

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that's a real invalid 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 to.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  The dildo or the ban?

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  Both, obviously, yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  Really? I don't really remember this. So what was that all about? Why would Dr. Seuss books have to go?

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  There's racially insensitive drawings in the books. Like, I could 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 Streets. Excellent book, whether you have children or not.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  I love the idea of people panic buying green eggs and ham as if that's going to be next on the list. I 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.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  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 an 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.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  A bunch of libraries refused to remove the books. My kid was like, three or four when this happened, and I just told him, 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 always before, 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.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  They edited Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to remove words like fat and ugly.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  It had previously been edited because the Oompa Loompas were originally caricatures of tribal Africans.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  I didn't know that. Okay, they must have done that before the movie came out because those guys were like spray tan orange.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember that whole debate when I was in high school. It's like, oh, there's a lot of N words in here. And it's like, yeah.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  Sure are.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  But like, the point is that people talked 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.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Remember Tucker Maxx and how?

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  His blog went crazy because people were like, you 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 Maxx's book on your campus or don't allow Tucker Maxx 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 were like, who's this terrible person that all the activists don't want us to know about?

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Oh, it's Tucker Maxx. 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.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  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 50s, 60s 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.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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, [email protected]. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show was created in association with Podcast One.

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tada Sidlowskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

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