MARK JUDGE: The New York Times wants you to read banned books — just not conservative ones.
New York Times critic A.O. Scott is concerned about America’s reading crisis. “Across the country,” he wrote in a recent Sunday edition of the Times, “Republican politicians and conservative activists are removing books from classroom and library shelves, ostensibly to protect children from ‘indoctrination’ in supposedly left-wing ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and history.”
Scott has fallen for the fake story that conservatives are banning books, when in reality school parents are simply requesting that books with sexual content be subject to parental approval, educational, and only available to the proper grade level. Scott selling this lie is a shame, because his piece also makes a rousing defense of reading, which he rightly describes as a transformative activity that can steer its practitioner away from leftist politics as much as towards them.
New York Times critic A.O. Scott is concerned about America’s reading crisis. “Across the country,” he wrote in a recent Sunday edition of the Times, “Republican politicians and conservative activists are removing books from classroom and library shelves, ostensibly to protect children from ‘indoctrination’ in supposedly left-wing ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and history.”
Scott has fallen for the fake story that conservatives are banning books, when in reality school parents are simply requesting that books with sexual content be subject to parental approval, educational, and only available to the proper grade level. Scott selling this lie is a shame, because his piece also makes a rousing defense of reading, which he rightly describes as a transformative activity that can steer its practitioner away from leftist politics as much as towards them.
To me, reading has always meant reinforcing or rediscovering deep truths about the human person, while also delving into edgy, challenging, and countercultural books that are deemed dangerous or offensive. I read and loved The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis, and the Bible, but also Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and The Killer Inside Me by pulp fiction master Jim Thompson. I always figured that’s how it should be — this is America, we can read what we want.
Until we can’t: The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway.