January 23, 2024
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6:59Now PlayingA school district in Northwest Florida has drawn the national media spotlight after it was revealed that they’ve banned dictionaries and encyclopedias in order to comply with governor Ron DeSantis’ book bans. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
A school district in northwest Florida has drawn the national media spotlight after it revealed that they were banning dictionaries and encyclopedias in order to comply with Governor DeSantis' book bans. Unfortunately, this is our, it's happening in our county.
It's our backyard.
Yeah. And I'm looking at this thing and first thing, I was looking, did they ban Grapes of Wrath because there's some sexual content? Or did they, you know, To Kill A Mockingbird, you go through all these and you can nitpick and find just about anything. Go ahead and pick the story up.
Yeah. This is, again, it's so horrible because it is literally in our backyard right here. But we've got the Escambia County School District that has banned 2,800 books as part of DeSantis signed HB 1069, which says any book that has any kind of sexual content, mentions of sex, can't do it.
It's not gonna stand.
Absolutely can't have it.
You agree, it's not gonna stand?
Oh, right.
I mean, as a matter of fact, the judge, I don't know what they're gonna rule, but we had some of our attorneys there listening to the argument, and it's just so unconstitutional. It's vague. You can't even figure out what it is that you're trying to accomplish here. Right?
Right. And that is, of course, one of the biggest issues with this. It's you've written it in a way that gives you the ability to ban anything. Which is why this district has pulled several versions of dictionaries off the shelves because they have a definition of the word sex. They're pulling encyclopedias off the shelf. Guinness Book of World Records comes off the shelves in this county right now, because, uh oh, it may have mentions of any kind of sexual activity or perhaps this person is of a different sexuality and they're being, I don't know that it's really the fault of the school district.
It's not, it's not.
Because they have the liability if a parent complains.
It's not the school district.
So they overreact and just say, everything's gone. No books.
Okay. You know what I thought about as I was reading this story, is I've thought about the number of times you and I have stood here, and we've talked about censorship in general. So this has got two sides to it. Okay. Here you got a bunch of right wingers, we don't want the word sex, but you also have the other side of it where speakers show up at a college campus and they're gonna say something that some segment of the campus disagrees with. So they censor the speaker. They say you can't show up, or the comedian standing up on the stage and he's just doing a show. But they say, oh, we don't like what he's saying. So we're going to, we're gonna boycott him. We're gonna make his life miserable. It's same kind of censorship. I mean, it's exactly the same thing. It's just the other side of it. But I don't see, or websites. Somebody puts up on a website something. We do it all the time. Hell, on this show, I insult plenty of people. And rather than analyzing what I'm saying, the easiest thing is to do is attack. Censor it. But that'll never happen with us because we're in a unique situation. We don't need advertisers. We don't need subscribe. We're independent. But what about the folks that feel that kind of censorship pressure? This is kind of the other side of that. I think.
Well, I will, just to address the point, if students wanna call for a boycott because they disagree with the speaker, I'm okay with that. Call for the boycott if you want to do that. It's when there is some kind of rule that comes down saying, okay, we can't have people that will say this or say that. That's when it goes into full blown censorship. So that obviously is a problem. With what's happening in this district right now.
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