Republican Book Banning Efforts DOUBLED Last Year

According to a new report from The New York Times, efforts to ban books in America doubled in the last year, with nearly 2,000 attempts nationwide. This increase in anti-book hysteria has got to stop, especially as the country faces very real problems and very real threats to our children's well-being while at school. Books aren't killing our children, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Between the years 2021 and 2022, the attempts to ban books here in the United States, both at public libraries and in public schools, more than doubled from 2021 to 2022. Last year, there were 1,269 different attempts across the country to ban books for children. Here's some other numbers. Of the 2,571 unique titles that drew complaints in 2022, which is up from 1,858 books in 2020. One of vast majority were books by or about l lgbtq people or books by or about people of color. So this is not about actually protecting children. This is about protecting children from getting to read about black people or gay people. We only want our kids in the United States to read about white folk books by white folk, for white folk. That's what this is about.

It starts with the banning of the books. That's what history tells us. And we all know what specific history I am referring to here. I don't even have to say it. We don't have to invoke that World War II imagery anymore because we're living it. We don't have to compare it to, oh, well, remember when this happened? We all learned about it, folks, those comparisons aren't doing us any good. Yes, I agree that it's the same, like we're headed down the same path of fascism, but we're already on it. It's not, oh, this is just the first step. No, we've, we've taken all the steps. Now we're well on our way towards fascism because it started with these book bands. But what gets me is just the stupidity of it. Not just the bigotry. I understand the bigotry. That's obviously the main factor, but the stupidity of it, because most of these books, most of these films that these angry Republican parents are trying to ban for our kids, y'all realize most of these have been out for decades and that our kids have been reading 'em just fine. We haven't had problems, we haven't had issues until Republican politicians decided to make it an issue so that they don't have to talk about the real issues and Republican voters, dumbest group of people in America. Sorry. But you are, you fall for it Every time. Every time. Hey, we don't have enough money to feed our kids. Well, you oughta be worried about the school feeding them transgender literature. Well, that's right. I know my child's stomach is rumbling because your policies have killed us in the state. But you're right,

Those books are the problem. Oh, I know that we have the highest infant mortality rate in the country because our healthcare system sucks in this state. But you're right. I should be more concerned about my children learning about a small African American girl that had to deal with racism when she was sent to a white school. This is where we're at. The Republicans have cultivated their base of stupid, and it's flourishing. It's changing the way this country operates, and not in a good way. The stupidest among us are calling the shots. And that's what you need for fascism to grow people too. stupid to question why we're not talking about the poisoning of the environment. Why aren't we talking about the fact that we can't feed our, our children or ourselves? Why aren't we talking about the fact that we can no longer afford to buy homes and all these corporations are coming up and buying these entire neighborhoods and tripling the home prices? Why aren't we talking about that? Because there's books that need abandon, and that's clearly more important. And that idiotic base man, they eat it up every time.