Blue-Haired Librarians Everywhere Celebrate Banned Books Week

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Gather around kids it's Banned Books Week, or I guess
next week is Banned Books Week. You're going to probably
see some signage for this, some advertising for this, if
you go to a library, if you go to a bookstore,
and it's nonsense. It's one of the stupidest things of
the year. So let me explain what this is. You'll

(00:22):
go to Barnes and Noble and they'll have a display
that says something like read a band Book. You'll go
to a library, it'll have a sign or display that
says read a band Book, and it'll usually be something
like nineteen eighty four or something like that, and you'll
read it and you'll probably, if you're like me and
when I first encountered these kinds of displays, think what

(00:46):
are you talking about? Band books? Catcher in the Rye,
nineteen eighty four whatever. And you're looking at it and
you think these books aren't banned. At what point in
a American history where they ever banned? And you'll think, well,
I mean, we have the First Amendment, None of these

(01:08):
books were ever banned. What are we talking about? Band
Books Week? Is this thing that's promoted by the American
Library Association and the American Library Association is somewhere slightly
to the left of the Communist Party, the Soviet the

(01:31):
actual Soviet Communist Party. That's how left wing these guys are, Okay,
these guys are so gals Veyvems are so whacked out,
completely hardcore left that it's it's hard to fathom. And
they've been pushing this whole banned Books Week band books

(01:54):
thing basically as a personal left wing grievance. Again, not
people banning books, people complaining about library curation. Now what
am I talking about? Let me explain. When you and
I hear ban that this is a banned book, a

(02:17):
book that has been banned, we think of, I don't know,
a situation under a jurisdiction like the Soviet Union or
Nazi Germany, a repressive to atalitarian government shutting down outlawing

(02:39):
the publication or distribution of a book due to the
ideological content that is dangerous to the regime. When we
hear banning books, that's those twentieth century. Well into the
twenty first century. Sure, the exact same kind of things
are still happening in China and North Korea and all
these other places around the world. The world that's the

(03:01):
kind of thing that comes to mind. That's not really
what the American Library and the Library Association is talking
about or what they actually care about. Now, they'll they'll
lead with books like nineteen eighty four Catchment Rite things
like that that probably were at some point band restricted

(03:21):
in some totalitarian government. And by the way, and the
idea that anyone in America dislike like, they'll they'll act
as though, oh, you should read a banned book. You're
being edgy and subversive. There's nothing edgy or subversive about
reading nineteen eighty four. I want to get this out
of this is a pet peeve, by the way, about

(03:42):
with my This is my pet peeve about George Orwell
and nineteen eighty four. George Orwell is like the only
reference point for certain kinds of boomers, because I think
it was like one of the few books that everyone
read in high school was Between Animal Farm in nineteen
eighty four. It was like one of the only books
that people read in high school. So it's this like

(04:05):
constant boomer reference point, and people can't think of any
other literature to compare anything with. And there's also this
sense that, oh, reading George Orwell is subversive. It's not subversive.
Nobody in America dislikes nineteen eighty four. Nobody in America
dislikes animal Farm. Everyone likes it other than like hardcore,

(04:32):
like DSA. People Okay, like democrats, Socialists of America types,
conventional liberals, and conventional democrats like it, which is what
Orwell was. He was a very conventional liberal, Okay. Orwell

(04:54):
was not like some revolutionary figure. He much of the
American left likes nineteen eighty four, much of the American
right likes in nineteen eighty four. It's not actually controversial
to read George Orwell. His views are not very controversial. Okay,
So anyway, let me that's just my pet peeve. But

(05:16):
a lot of these books that the American Library Association
describes as lists as banned, they're not actually books that
were in any way prohibited by the American government from
being published or being released, as is evidenced by the
fact that here's a display of all the books that
you can freely borrow from the library or freely buy

(05:40):
from this bookstore right now. Of quote banned books, well,
if they're banned, they're not doing a very good job
of banning it. Because here it is sitting right here,
and I can very freely buy it, and I could
have very freely bought or borrowed it literally at any
time over the course of my entire life. What do
they actually mean? What the American Library Association actually means

(06:00):
is books about which people have complained about which people
have submitted complaints to libraries, whether that was a public
official or a private individual. Now, I think you and
I can agree that someone complaining about a book's placement

(06:23):
in a library is not the same as banning it, right,
Someone complaining is certainly not the same as banning it.
And the ALA also includes any time that a book
was excluded from a library or had its access in

(06:49):
any way limited that that counts as a book ban
So a book being moved from the kids section to
the adults section, for example, they count as banning with
no sense in their description of these things from what

(07:10):
I can see about whether or not such a ban
could be legitimate. Basically, they seem to confuse the concept
of banning a book with library curation, and I think
they do this intentionally. I think when you say banning

(07:31):
a book, everyone's first Amendment antenna pops up. Okay, a
library is banning a book from being put on its shelves. Huh.
This seems like it's a governmental entity, a library, which
is usually an organ of either a county government or
a city government. This is the government prohibiting access to

(07:55):
information on the basis of its content. That raises all
of our First Amendment antennas, and that seems bad. But
libraries make all kinds of decisions about making books more
or less accessible to different groups of people, about you know,

(08:19):
stocking or not stocking books all the time. An individual
library might decide, okay, random novel published in two thousand
and five by a middling author that was not even

(08:39):
very popular when it was published by you know, Penguin
Random House and is even less popular today. All right, Well,
maybe maybe we have one copy we might need like,
you know, five copies of The Hobbit or of nineteen

(08:59):
eighty four, or Animal Farm or some novel some you
know Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice. We might need five
copies of Pride and Prejudice. We might only need one
copy of you know, Kamala Harris's biography. Why, Well, because
a librarian with a brain in her head or in

(09:20):
his head can see Okay, Pride and Prejudice is a
much more important book than Kamala Harris's biography. It's going
to be much more long lasting, a lot more people
might want to read it for you know, high school kids.
A lot of high school kids read Pride and Prejudice

(09:40):
as part of school, and then it's a very popular novel.
We maybe we have five copies of Pride and Prejudice
on the shelf and we only have one copy of
Kamala Harris's book.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
You're restricting access to Kamala Harris's book. This is Are
you trying to ban it?

Speaker 1 (10:02):
No, we are making a curation decision on the basis
of a variety of factors. You also, if you're a library,
you don't have to stock every book, not every book
that's submitted to you. You have to stock if a
local pervert writes a book of erotic fiction that he

(10:26):
self publishes, and he gives his book to the library
and it's poorly written so such that he had to
self publish it because no actual publisher would want to
like touch the thing. Library doesn't have to shelve that.
They can make decisions on the basis of quality on

(10:49):
the basis of also like is this obscenity, Like you
don't have to shelve in a public library, you know,
erotica or pornography or anything like that. You don't have to.
You can make curation decisions also the question of where
to put a book that's not First Amendment violative censorship.

(11:14):
I remember that it was this young woman who was
like a poet, like some kind of poet laureate or something,
and she did like this poem at Biden's inauguration, and
it was a book about her, like a kind of
kid's oriented book about her. There was some school in
Florida that moved her book from like the little kids

(11:36):
section to like the young reader's section, and the news
story broke.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
About it, Florida School's Ron DeSantis censor's book by Obama poet,
by Obama poet or Biden poet.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Rather, And it's like, well, first of all, that Ron
Desanta's had nothing to do with the decision. It was
just some library or school in Florida. But they didn't
ban the book. They didn't censor the book. They just
put it from the little kids section to like the
middle school kids section. A perfectly reasonable decision. It's not

(12:13):
really prejudicial to the book itself. It's just trying to, well,
who's the intended audience for this book. And it's also
a question of like, okay, what kind of content is
appropriate for kids at this level versus that level. And
here we get to the crux of the problem, the
huge push among LGBT activists and that sort of circle

(12:41):
of the world to introduce highly sexualized themes to really
young children. This is I think the crux of where
Banned Books Week was going, and it's now at the
heart of the Banned Books Week sort of messaging where they're.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Saying there's just an enormous increase in books.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Being banned, by which they don't mean the books are
actually being banned, they mean they're being challenged. And this,
by the way, this is the other thing with Banded
Books Week, is that we're not talking about publishers refusing
to publish, sellers like Amazon dot Com refusing to sell.
We're talking about people complaining about books being made available

(13:31):
in usually kid sections of libraries, of public libraries like
county libraries, and within public school libraries, where again the
First Amendment curation, the first Amendment really is not something

(13:54):
that's applying here. The only area of this where the
First Amendment might actually come into play is if libraries
are censoring it because of core protected political speech, out
of an attempt to censor ideas of core protected political speech.

(14:14):
If a library, for example, said we're not going to
have any left wing authors whatsoever and took off the
shelf any book by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and
Bill Clinton, whatever, that could be a First Amendment violation.
But if a library is saying, this content does not

(14:37):
seem appropriate for children, we're gonna move it out of
the kids section. This book is intended for five year olds,
but just does not seem well written, seems to advance
sexual themes very way too early. We're not in that
point talking about core protected that the core protected elements

(14:58):
of the First Amendment right to the freedom of speech.
We're talking about other things. Libraries making those sorts of
curation decisions are not really touching on the First Amendment
in any meaningful way. Nor is it even a question

(15:19):
of banning the book. Okay, you can't find this library,
You can't find this book in the kid's section of
the library. If you can ably find it on Amazon
dot Com and have it shipped to your house within
two days. I'm sorry, I don't calling that a quote
banned book seems kind of silly to me. Now, let's

(15:42):
note the kinds of books that they don't care about
as quote banned books. A number of bookstores, libraries, and
probably more than one library, and I bet it just
wasn't talked about a lot. Several bookstores wound up deciding

(16:04):
that when J. K Rowling started running her mouth as
they would think about it about transgenderism, and J. K
Rowling saying I don't think transgenderism is true. I think
it diminishes the rights of women. A lot of bookstores
chucked out there. Harry Potter books when Ryan Anderson, who's

(16:24):
the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which
is a big think tank in Washington, d C. He's
a very well respected scholar of ethics and anthropology. His
work on gay marriage was cited by Justice Scalia in
his descent in Obergefell, very prominent public intellectual. When he

(16:45):
published his book When Harry Became Sally, which was his
book on transgenderism, Amazon refused to sell it. Amazon refusing
to publish your book because of its content. And by
the way, this was not Ryan Anderson going on a
diatribe about how trans people ought to be killed and

(17:06):
shot in the back of the head. It was nothing
like that. It was an incredibly charitable, intelligent, scholarly look
at the question of transgenderism from an anthropological standpoint, coming
to a conclusion that people just didn't like. We're not

(17:29):
going to highlight that during band Books Week for some reason.
When we returned, we'll talk about more of the books
that sort of they don't want to talk about with
regards to band Books Week. That's next on the John
Druardy Show. There are other books that don't seem to
get brought up a lot during band Books Week, which

(17:49):
band Books Week is just a way for blue haired
librarians to feel better about themselves and to sort of
for them to cosplay is a costplayer cosplay? I guess
it's a costplay, and I mostly read, rather than say
cosplay as these great heroes defending the First Amendment when
they're not. Really we're not talking about books that actually

(18:12):
have been banned. We're not talking talking about books that
the government has refused to allow to be published. We're
talking about books that either people complained about usually complained
about their presence in kids sections of libraries, in elementary
school libraries because the content was not appropriate for kids,

(18:37):
which is not a ban. It's people complaining. And even
if such books were removed from kids sections, that's not
a ban. That's library curation. You might agree or disagree
with the curation decision about whether it was correct, but
that's not a ban. Some of the books they don't
bring up because they to think, well, yeah, they probably

(19:01):
shouldn't be in the kids section. Let's talk about Huckleberry Finn. Hm,
all you blue haired lefty ladies. Huckleberry Finn is one
of the great classics of American literature, the most famous
book by one of the most famous American authors in history,

(19:26):
Mark Twain. So you guys okay with putting Huckleberry Finn
unedited original version in the kids section. Well, you're gonna
have some people a little more antsy about that. Oh

(19:47):
so you think that there are some elements in Huckleberry
Finn that are you know, published in eighteen eighty four,
uses a certain word quite a bit, uses that word
a lot, do you guys? You guys are okay with
the unedited original version of Huckleberry Finn being in kids

(20:10):
sections of libraries, the teen section of libraries. Uh oh oh,
you blue haired librarians out there, you're okay with that?
Oh okay. So when you guys find a book that
you find troubling, And by the way, I'm kind of
a little there with you, but I'm not the guy

(20:32):
who calls any act of library curation banning. All right,
I think, yeah, you probably need to have maybe a
little bit of sensitivity as far as how you present
Huck Finn. If you present Huck Finn, do you do
maybe a sort of slightly different version of Huck Finn
for sort of younger audiences. Uh? Yeah, I don't want
my five year old learning the end word, or you know,

(20:54):
I don't want it in the kids section of the
library where my you know, seven year old boy can
pick it up and well, hey, dad, I heard about
this interesting character. His name is Boob Jim. No. I mean,
I'm the guy who's saying I think libraries can maybe
curate things for age appropriateness for children. So maybe we

(21:18):
put the original version of Huck Finn, Maybe we put
that over in the adult section or something. Maybe we
make some kind of curation decision. But the blue haired types,
the blue haired librarian types, they want to set They
would say if I did the exact same line of

(21:39):
reasoning of hey, there's a lot of sex included in
this book. This is not a healthy presentation of sex.
Like you know, I don't think this should be in
the teen section of the library. I think we put
it in the adult section of the library. The blue
haired types would try to argue, while you're banning that book. No,

(22:04):
it's curation. It's trying to say certain kinds of books
are more appropriate for certain kinds of audiences rather than others.
They present themes of differing levels of maturity. We can
have an argument over those standards, but disagreeing about those

(22:28):
standards and how we apply those standards, that's not book banning.
It's not the same as book banning. We shouldn't call
it book banning because you're using the same word in
reference to a swath of activity from Missus McGillicutty, the
librarian saying, I think this isn't really appropriate for the
kids section of the library. I'm going to put it
in the adult section or the teen section. All the

(22:50):
way to Adolph Hitler burning stacks of books because they
presented dangerous ideas. You shouldn't use the same word for
those two activities because they are mid l's apart, all right,
speaking of not using the same word for different activities
that are miles apart. When we return, I want to
talk about the word racist and maybe think about how
we apply that word to very different things. Next on

(23:14):
the John Girardi Show, I want to talk about the
word racist. I think it's too big of a word.
I think we use that same adjective or it's its
noun form racism to apply to a spectrum of activity

(23:36):
from one end to another. That is just too broad.
It's too broad. Let me tell you what brought this up,
all right? President Trump has, for some reason, in the
current fight that's going on on Capitol Hill between Republicans

(23:57):
and Democrats and the shutdown of the federal government now
in effect, and Republicans are blaming Schumer for it, Schumer
and Hakeem Jeffries, Democrats are blaming Republicans for it. Whatever
we're fighting. Trump keeps posting these videos of Schumer and

(24:18):
Jeffries talking at press conferences and these little AI animations
keep popping up of Jeffries where he's putting a big
old Mexican sombrero and a mustache, superimposing like little cartoon
graphics of that on top of Hakeem Jeffries. And the

(24:39):
way some of the press is reporting on it is like, well,
we want to warn you that this is an AI
generated image. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. Nobody thought that Hakeem
Jeffries came to a press conference wearing like a normal
congress members suit and tie, but also a big corny
fake mustache and a big silly sombrero. Okay, nobody thought that.

(25:01):
You really didn't need to warn us about it. The now,
I'm not exactly even sure why Trump was doing it
because I don't think Jeffries is Mexican. I don't even
think Jeffrey's is a Mexican or Latino. Maybe he's I
don't know, maybe he's like some kind of I honestly

(25:22):
have no idea about Jaquem Jeffrey's racial background. I think
I believe he's African American, but I have no I
don't know does he have something else in there. I
have genuinely very little idea about QE. Jeffrey's racial background.
So I'm actually not even sure I completely understand why
Trump is doing it, other than it kind of looks
silly and funny, and he knows that it annoys Jeffries.

(25:49):
That act superimposing a cartoonish picture of a sombrero and
a mustache over Hiquem Jeffries that has been called racist.
Now that's why I don't like it. You can use
the word racist for that, which is I think the

(26:12):
worst you could say about it is that it is tasteless,
very mildly offensive. People have said it plays in ugly
stereotypes about Mexicans, which, frankly I then was like, well, okay,

(26:34):
I don't know what's the ugly stereotype. The idea that
Mexicans have mustaches and big hats. I mean some, not
every single Mexican, but some Mexicans do do have big
mustaches and some and the big sombrero was a sort
of traditional Mexican kind of article of clothing. Is it

(27:01):
like a harmful I mean, I don't think most people
genuinely think today that Mexicans walk around dressing like that.
Maybe I'm too Californian and those of us who live
in California and have lots and lots of Mexican friends
and neighbors would disagree or would have a different conception
of that. It wasn't Trump saying all Mexicans are lazy

(27:27):
bums or blah blah blah blah blah or anything like that.
It was just now, would I have done it, No,
probably not. It's a lot of things Trump does that
I wouldn't have done. And I'm not saying even that
it was good. I think the worst, but I think
it's not like the worst, most grievous, mortal sin that

(27:50):
anyone's ever committed. I think it was mildly offensive at worst.
But the word racist, the adjective racist, gets applied to it.
That same adjective racist is used against, for example, Kramer

(28:11):
or Michael Richardson, who who played Michael Richards richards I
think who played kramer On Seinfeld, who his career tanked
after he had a bad stand up comedy set and
he descended into some people were heckling him in the crowd,
and he started calling them the N word and loudly
yelling that they were all a bunch of N words.

(28:33):
That's more racist than Donald Trump superimposing a mustache and
a sombrero over Hakeem Jeffries. And then you can use
the word racist for the most horrific offense, some of
the most horrific sins in the entire American experiment, chattel, slavery, lynching,

(28:56):
refusing to allow African Americans equality under law. We call
those things racist. So the same adjective is being applied
to a mildly tasteless joke done by Donald Trump, all
the way to which not to speak on behalf of

(29:20):
the entire Mexican people. But I think, I mean, Donald
Trump had a lot of Mexicans vote for him, and
Donald Trump said a lot of stuff about Mexicans that
the Left was like clutching their pearls and gasping about.
I mean, no Republican president has gotten more Latino votes
than Donald Trump. And a lot of Latinos are big
time fans of Donald Trump. And I'll bet dollars to

(29:43):
donuts there was a non zero number of Latinos who
laughed at the Hakeem Jefferys thing. But the word racist
is applied to again this at worst mildly offensive thing
of putting us some rare on a mustache on Hickeem
Jeffries all the way to the horrors of the international

(30:07):
slave trade, of shipping African Americans across the Atlantic Ocean
to be slaves in America. It's too big of a word.
It's too big of a word. We shouldn't use the
same word for these wildly discrete things. And I think
that's at the root of the cancel culture that afflicted

(30:31):
especially millennials who were This is how this stuff operated
when I was in college and grad school, in college
and law school on a university campus, the idea was
saying something racially insensitive was so bad that you could
get canceled for it. You could be shunned for it

(30:54):
because the word racist was applied to it. If you
said the wrong kind of term, if you did something
that was dismissive to a person who is African American
or Hispanic, whatever, that you could thereby be canceled, even
just down to word choice, because that same word racism

(31:19):
got applied to again something ranging from a very mildly offensive,
playfully engaging in stereotyping that might be offensive to some people,
but also like I don't know a lot of my
friends who are Latinos can laugh at themselves, can poke

(31:43):
a little fun at themselves while poking a little fun
at me, Right, make some joke about Italians, make some
joke about Irish people, Like, it's not as if all
these Latinos are like just these wound did these poor
wounded waifs who cannot stand up in the face of

(32:06):
the horrific oppression of Donald Trump putting a mustache on
Hikeem Jeffries, Like a lot of these people are fine,
are not really all that upset about it? And again
I'm not saying it's good. I'm not saying I would
have done it. I'm just saying calling that racist and

(32:29):
acting as if Donald Trump is.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Out of bounds beyond the pale racist, it's full on racist.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
That's not no. That that is miles different from I
don't know, systematically, uh, discriminating against Asians when they apply
for colleges because there are too many of them and
you want other races to get more of these limited
number of seats, Like that's actually racist Affirmative action practices

(33:02):
to say we are not going to admit Asians, we
are going to artificially not accept Asians who are otherwise
completely qualified because we want less qualified people from different
races to get in, which is what the left has
done for I don't know, the last twenty years in
higher education. Like that's actually racist. You're actually treating these

(33:27):
people differently, not affording them precious opportunities for advancement, purely
on the basis of their racial background. That's racist. Or
it's more racist than putting a sombrero and a cartoon

(33:47):
sombrero and mustache on Hakeem Jeffries. That's for darn sure.
Nothing in no way has Hakeem Jeffries been existentially harmed
by this act. You know, someone being denied entrance to
Berkeley and having to go to UCSD or something like that.

(34:08):
You know, it's it's not the end of the world.
Lots of people from UCSD get go on to very
good things. It's it's you know, I'm not saying this person's,
you know, gonna die in the gutter or something because
they went to US UCSD rather than Berkeley. But it's
a thing. Berkeley is a more prestigious degree than UCSD.
It just is it's harder to get into. It's a

(34:30):
better school, higher average sat, more prestigious teachers, more it's
it's a more prestigious platform. It could help you get
into a better grad school, help you. It just is
it's a bigger deal going to Harvard or Yale versus
going to I don't know, Dartmouth. Like that. There's a
there's a bit of a delta there. There is so

(34:57):
this idea that that we use this same word racism
to apply to a somewhat insensitive comment by someone who's
not up to date with the most modern university professor
approved lingo for talking about race issues on the one hand,

(35:20):
versus actively legally disadvantaging people to throwing someone in chains
and enslaving them. It doesn't make any sense to me.
I think it's way too big of a spectrum where
we're using one word for it. If you want to
say Donald Trump was racially insensitive or mildly racially insensitive

(35:43):
or something, you throw a couple of adverbs in there
to kind of qualify that. Okay, go ahead, for the
sake of argument, I'll concede that to you, and maybe true.
I mean again, I agree, like again, it's not a
thing I would have done. I think it's a little silly,
But again, you know, you know, it's a little silly

(36:04):
Trump is, of course a better advertiser than I am.
He's president of the United States. He's won two more
presidential elections than I have. Again, there's a lot of
stuff Trump does that I wouldn't do, including this, but
the idea that like, oh this is the most serious,
that oh this is racist Donald Trump just continuing to

(36:27):
show his ugly racism. I don't even I just find
this to be very mild. I don't even know that
too many Mexicans would be that upset about it. I mean,
feel free to correct me, but I don't know the
number of Mexicans I see who will like playfully share
the meme of like, oh, it's a one year old's

(36:47):
birthday party and they show a whole pickup truck full
of ice with beer, just loaded with a gazillion bottles
of medello. You know, there are funny little things about
Mexican culture that people can laugh about without it being
ugly racism. So again, in short, I don't like the

(37:08):
word racist. There are some things that, yeah, maybe we
should use it for, but the spectrum is way too big,
all right, When we return a little complaint about Halloween
and Halloween decorations. Next on the John Girardi Show. This
is a small complaint. Yeah, maybe it's a bigger complaint.
I'm getting really tired as a dad of small children

(37:34):
of people going overboard on Halloween. I'm not talking about
having Halloween decorations. If you want to have a cute
little ghostye or a happy little Jack O'Lantern, that's fine.
But stop having like a bloody life size statue of
Freddy Krueger Jason. Stop having actually scary looking like horror stuff.

(37:59):
Why do you want for ten percent of your life?
Because some of these psychos who do this, they start
putting up their decorations in mid September. Why do you
want to have that? It's ugly and this is a
holiday for little kids to dress up like buzz light
Year and have fun, get in candy. Stop it. That'll
do it. John Jrody Show, See you next time on Power

(38:19):
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