How Woke Censors Took Over Publishing

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This week on Conversations with Coleman, I’m joined by writer and cultural critic Adam Szetela, author of "That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing." Its publisher calls it “an alarming exposé of the new challenges to literary freedom in the age of social media, when anyone with an identity and an internet connection can be a censor.”

In his book, Adam explores how the publishing industry has become a front line in America’s culture wars, shaped not just by politics, but by moral panics, Twitter pile-ons, and a growing fear of offending anyone. We talk about the rise of so-called sensitivity readers, the weaponization of social media outrage, and how these forces are making publishers more risk-averse and ideologically conformist, to the detriment of great writing.

Adam argues that under the guise of inclusion, the industry is often engaging in a new form of gatekeeping, one that discourages creative freedom, narrows the kinds of stories that get told, and ultimately treats readers and writers as too fragile to handle discomfort or complexity.

We also dig into his controversial claim that efforts to avoid stereotyping can, paradoxically, lead to a kind of unintentional racism, one that reduces characters to moral symbols rather than human beings.