Conservatives Censor Where It Counts

Conservatives are increasingly emboldened in their censorship. But are liberal-progressives any less censorious – or are their approaches simply harder to spot? We dive in for Freedom to Read Week.

Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash

The American Library Association’s top ten banned books of 2021 – the most recent year for which the list is available – feature titles challenged on the basis of being sexually explicit, woke, racially divisive, LGBTQIA, anti-police, obscene, profane, and more. It is de rigueur to attribute these challenges to coordinated efforts among astroturfed, dark-money-funded arch-conservative factions, and to associate censorship with conservatism. 

But is that the whole story? 

Conservatives are, to be sure, increasingly emboldened in their approach to censorship. They are politically organizing around the issue of restricting access to certain information and viewpoints, increasingly vocal at library and school board meetings, and proposing legislation that would criminalize library activities and classroom content.

Put another way, conservatives are pushing a censorship agenda in the public sphere, where it can be observed, critiqued, and resisted. Conservative shamelessness in censorship confers its own transparency. As such, conservative attempts to censor can be both counted, and countered. 

Are liberal-progressives any less censorious – or are their approaches to censorship simply harder to spot, and therefore less likely to be documented? A deeper look at trends in libraries, publishing, education, and online speech challenges any notion that liberal-progressives are noble defenders of free speech culture. What’s more, because liberal-progressive censorship tactics are less transparent or less rooted in (small d) democratic processes, they attract less attention and are more difficult to counter.

The Conservative Lacuna

On seeking conservative books in library collections.

The disparate impact of book bans and challenges on LGBTQIA and anti-racist books is evident in reporting by the ALA and PEN America. But such reports belie a simple fact:

In order to be banned or challenged, a book must exist in a library collection in the first place.

Libraries hold banned and challenged books at many times the rate that they hold conservative books – for some titles, the difference spans two orders of magnitude. Inspired by Heterodoxy in the Stacks (hereafter HITS) contributor Susan Anderson’s analysis of book review coverage of conservative-leaning publications, I undertook an analysis of Worldcat holdings comparing the ALA’s Top Ten Challenged Books of 2021 to contemporary conservative children’s and teen / young adult books listed as Amazon best sellers or featured in mainstream media reporting.¹

The comparison reveals that the top-ten challenged book with the fewest library holdings, Jonathan Evison’s 2018 book Lawn Boy with 9 editions in 1,511 libraries, has two times the presence in libraries as the most widely-held contemporary conservative children’s book in the analysis, Ganit and Adir Levy’s What Should Danny Do? (2017) with 2 editions in 718 libraries, and the most widely-held contemporary conservative YA book in the analysis, Bill O’Reilly’s The Day the World Went Nuclear: Dropping the Atom Bomb and the End of World War II in the Pacific (2017) with 5 editions in 655 libraries.²

Let’s call it the Simpson’s Paradox of library holdings: contemporary conservative children’s and YA books are vastly underrepresented in library collections compared to the most banned and challenged liberal-progressive titles.

Additionally, a list of seventeen titles recommended for high school readers by the Young America’s Foundation, comprised of literature, non-fiction works and primary sources, features four titles appearing on ALA’s frequently banned lists, three titles that were banned in other countries, and three founding documents of American history for which the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) created a Statement on Potentially Harmful Content. Of the remaining seven titles which have faced no known challenges, four are held in fewer than 500 libraries. The Young America’s Foundation list of twenty-four recommended novels contains eight challenged books alongside four books that have faced no known challenges, as well as twelve contemporary works by best-selling author Brad Thor which are collected at comparable rates to the ALA’s Most Challenged Books of 2021.

Finally, of a list of twenty classic literary titles recommended for early through young adult readers by The Imaginative Conservative, four are on ALA’s Frequently Challenged Young Adult Books list, six were reportedly challenged or banned in other outlets, two belong to authors or genres that are the subject of decolonization and #disrupttexts movements, and two are written by an author whose name the ALA Association for Library Service to Children removed from its Children’s Literature Legacy Award. Six of the twenty titles have faced no known challenges or bans.³ By these measures,

Liberal-progressives do not hold a monopoly on the harm of having their viewpoints censored.

As in the classic slasher-film trope, the most dangerous book bans and challenges are the calls coming from inside the house. HITS contributor Amy Girard wrote that the Canadian Federation of Library Association’s 2021 Intellectual Freedom Challenges Survey Report “saw the largest number of complaints initiated by library staff in the history of the survey.” One Ontario school system removed books from its libraries and infamously burned them “for educational purposes” in a “flame purification” ceremony in 2019, while a Chattanooga Public Library employee was fired for the improper removal of two conservative books weeded from the library’s collection after they were seen being burned in his instagram post in 2021.

But library workers have another, less visible (and inflammatory) avenue for censorship: the process by which they choose books to include in the library collection.

As Lester Asheim described in his 1953 essay, Not Censorship but Selection, a selector’s action is positive – “the important thing is to find reasons to keep [or acquire] the book” – while the censor’s action is negative – “the important thing is to find reasons to reject the book.”

If libraries increasingly succumb to ideological capture by radical liberal-progressive orthodoxies, the issue of book-ban-by-selection-censorship will only compound. When libraries fail to add conservative-leaning books to their collections, the work of censorship that liberal-progressives would otherwise undertake has been done for them.⁴ By Asheim’s measure, emerging trends to decanonize and decolonize library collections (or, in the words of Ithaka S+R, to “decenter white authors”) are censorship in their own right – but don’t expect them to be counted as book challenges.

Monopolizing the Marketplace of Ideas

Liberal-progressive censorship in publishing and the arts.

Before a book can be selected for a library collection, it first must be published. Liberal-progressive orthodoxies in publishing and the arts have created an environment of line-toeing, self-censorship, and conformity, enforced by deplatforming, defunding, cancellation, and – in the recent case of Roald Dahl – even posthumous revision. A former chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts observes that DEI prerogatives began noticeably influencing the artistic domain in 2013. Now ten years later, some creators worry that totalitarian conditions in which art is not permitted to exist outside of politics are enforced when funding (both public and private) for artistic endeavors is contingent on commitments to DEI and other social justice efforts – evidence of coerced speech in even the most creative and expressive spheres.

In book publishing, the chilling effect of cancel culture fervor that epitomized the demise of once-acclaimed novel American Dirt has led to publishing house staff uprisings and the cancellations of book deals on topics ranging from the history of empire to transgenderism or by authors deemed too controversial to platform. On the margins of the publishing market, liberal-progressives also targeted the crowd-funding campaigns for two conservative-leaning comics and graphic novels, exhibiting no tolerance for readers directly funding the work of independent authors with whose work they disagree. (Neither campaign is championed by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, although one of the impacted artists was a panelist for a 2017 event promoted by CBLDF). 

In its defense of Penguin Random House’s decision to move forward with the publication of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book, the National Coalition Against Censorship distinguished itself by recognizing the parallels between liberal-progressive claims of ‘harm’ in the publication of a book by a justice who voted to overturn federal protections for abortion rights and conservative claims of ‘harm’ in the availability of LGBTQIA or anti-racist literature in public and school libraries. NCAC likewise issued a principled critique of Amazon’s decision to discontinue sales of the transgender-critical title, When Harry Became Sally.

Consolidation in the publishing and bookselling industries means the decision to publish and market books rests in fewer hands enmeshed in the financial, legal, and ideological entanglements born of mergers and acquisitions. While some see government intervention as the only solution to ideological capture, publishing’s cancel culture has created cottage industries at both ends of the spectrum, with sensitivity (or authenticity) readers on the one hand, and publishers of last resort on the other. Even under conditions of monopoly-by-orthodoxy, the invisible hand of the market remains preferable to the heavy hand of government regulation in manners of speech.

A 2020 Pew Research Center survey finds that liberals are much more likely to characterize cancel culture as a legitimate form of holding others accountable for harms, while conservatives are more likely to see cancel culture as censorship. According to Pew, conservatives are also more likely than liberals to prioritize freedom of expression over people feeling welcome and safe in online environments. More broadly, liberal-progressives have assumed gatekeeping roles in education, professional credentialing, and commercial services which have “the power to exclude people from the economy” with private sector blacklists if they resist falling in line with orthodoxy. In the words of Nigel Biggar, author of the formerly canceled Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning,

“They cancel, because they can’t answer.”

Further consolidation of control over education could preclude the need to cancel in the first place.

Education or Indoctrination?

Liberal-progressive censorship in education.

Liberal-progressive orthodoxies in education crash-landed into mainstream consciousness with remote learning during the pandemic, a period that saw thirteen states reportedly allocating nearly $50billion in COVID relief funds for the implementation of anti-racism, anti-bias, and other DEI initiatives in schools. In K-12 education, homeschooling rates rose in the wake of pandemic mandates and remote learning with Black and Hispanic families leading the surge, providing an alternative to what parents on both ends of the political spectrum perceive as indoctrination in the public education system. Critics of the divergent whitewashing of history and revisionist history efforts like the 1619 Project both have legitimate claims. Such misinterpretations and misrepresentations of historical realities in K-12 education crowd out needed truths and understanding in a manner of censorship called information flooding, which, in matters of race and gender, increasingly reflect liberal-progressive views.

In higher education, developments at Stanford University reveal the absurd encroachment of liberal-progressive sensibilities on the learning environment. In recent months, a student was reported to the university’s Protected Identity Harm anti-bias reporting system for being photographed reading Mein Kampf – a title that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) notes is both assigned as a required course reading and available in the library – and the university’s IT department launched an Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative that advised against the use of 161 terms like “people of color (used generically),” “submit,” “hip hip hooray,” and “American” in an effort to

“eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased (e.g., disability bias, ethnic bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, implicit bias, sexual bias) language in Stanford websites and code.”

(Librarians take note: we should no longer characterize impromptu research consultations as ‘walk-in’ reference services.) Following months of public mockery, Stanford reportedly discontinued the initiative. 

Other recent developments in higher education include the dismissal of an art history instructor for showing an artistic depiction of the Prophet Muhammad at the behest of the school’s Office of Inclusive Excellence; a scholar threatening legal action against a university in an attempt to censor library-initiated programming; a FIRE Campus Scholar initiative to document pervasive self-censorship at the overwhelmingly liberal Haverford College (my alma mater); and scholars cloaking themselves in the anonymity of the deep web to discuss research “in a way that is simply impossible within the censorious confines of modern academia.”

In their endeavor to create safe spaces, college and university campuses have become places that students characterize as unsafe for the exploration of ideas and viewpoints – in other words, for the primary mission of higher education.

A recent University of Wisconsin survey of student views on freedom of speech found that a preponderance of very liberal students attributed harm to offensive speech equivalent to acts of violence and approved of disinviting (or deplatforming, or canceling) speakers if their views are offensive, and that seven in ten very liberal students approved of reporting instructors who uttered something that could be perceived as harmful to university administration. Conservative students were significantly more likely to report feeling pressured to agree with a political or ideological view expressed in class, and to self-censor. Multiyear student surveys on campus speech sentiments by the Knight Foundation and Heterodox Academy find increasing numbers of students experiencing a chilling campus climate that engenders self-censorship amidst a parallel increasing rate of students who feel unsafe because of comments made on campus. Similar dynamics are playing out online, where there is newly emerging evidence that government-corporate censorship shapes public discourse.

Mercenary Censors

Government-corporate censorship online.

The Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies work directly with tech and media companies to shape online discourse on priority topics, including COVID-19, elections, race, and war, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. One study found that tech companies took action to censor 35% of user-generated content flagged as suspicious or potential misinformation. Under President Biden, social media is being treated as “critical infrastructure” to justify continued government-corporate surveillance and censorship. Twitter Files analyzed by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger revealed that Twitter’s Safety, Content, & Law Enforcement unit collected $3.4 million in payment from the FBI between October 2019 and February 2021, in part for banning accounts disproportionately linked to conservatives. While debates about the relative censorship or amplification of conservative- and liberal-leaning online content remain unsettled, others note the recent liberal-progressive embrace of the security state, the liberal lean of the adtech industry, and the resounding silence of the legacy press. In Jonathan Turley’s words,

“The red scare is back and it is going blue.”

That government-corporate censorship just happens to favor liberal-progressive views at this particular juncture is not the true threat - it’s the conscription of private industry in violations of the First and Fourth Amendments that would otherwise be unconstitutional for the government to engage in. (Nice multi-billion-dollar tech platform you got there, would be a shame if something happened to it!) More fundamentally, government-corporate censorship repeatedly censored the truth, or otherwise reasonable and legitimate debates about what is true. Perhaps reality has shed its liberal bias.

But none of this matters to the people unable to read it.

The Ultimate Form of Censorship

Should liberal-progressives own illiteracy?

Liberal bastions California and New York are the states with the two lowest adult literacy rates. California, which is one of the top ten wealthiest  and most liberal states in the US and yet lags behind national averages for the number of public libraries per capita and number of teacher-librarians per student, boasts the lowest literacy rate of any state in the US with nearly one in four adults functionally illiterate. Recent analysis finds that not a single student is reading at grade-level in 30 schools in liberal Illinois, 22 of which are in Chicago; while in Democratically-controlled Baltimore, 77% of students tested in one high school are reading at an elementary school level.

American Public Media senior correspondent Emily Hanford reports that 65% of fourth graders can’t read, the result of a flawed approach to literacy acquisition that is prominent in US schools. Among college enrollees, 40% require a remedial course to master content they should have learned in K-12 education – a rate that rises to 53% for Latino students and 66% for Black students. An analysis by The New Teaching Project finds that students spend three-quarters of their time on grade-inappropriate schoolwork, amounting to six months of lost learning time in a single school year, and that students of color and low-income students are disproportionately impacted. While pandemic policies will be blamed for many of these failings, they didn’t create them – they only exacerbated or revealed them.

Censorship is unnecessary when the audience in question cannot read.

Given that the education profession and professional associations largely lean liberal, should liberal-progressives own the literacy crisis?

Shadowboxing in the Culture War

On fighting an unseen opponent.

Jason Stanley argues that to characterize conservative attempts to ban books and censor teachers a “culture war” falls short of the truth – that it actually constitutes fascism.

Fair enough.

What I find oddly reassuring about conservative censorship is its very brazenness – the fact that it operates in the full light of day, in petitions and board meetings and referenda and legislative action. While I do not deny that undemocratic ends can be achieved through democratic means, I remain optimistic that conservative censorship can ultimately be countered through democratic institutions. 

On the other hand, recent empirical evidence points to the existence of long-doubted left-wing authoritarianism. I argue that the LWA propensity for restrictive social norms can manifest in silent censorship, the excesses of cancel culture, government-corporate surveillance and censorship, and adherence to ideologies that systematically cripple educational institutions. Yet by its nature, liberal-progressive censorship is less visible and more likely to be couched in the palatable platitudes of harm reduction and inclusivity.

Conservatives censor where it counts — and can be countered. Liberal-progressives control the means of production, marketing, and distribution in culture, media, and education, with many more levers to pull to ensure some ideas never see the light of day without us even knowing.

As a free speech maximalist and freedom to read advocate, I’d much prefer to engage an opponent who attacks in the open than one who operates in the shadows.

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1. See the complete Worldcat holdings analysis discussed in this post via Google Doc.

2. The most widely held conservative teen / YA book is Sean Covey’s 1998 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens with 25 editions in 2,894 libraries, but its twenty-five-year lifespan confers a disproportionate advantage for purposes of comparing library holdings.

3. See the complete Worldcat holdings analysis discussed in this post via Google Doc.

4. In case it’s in question, the professions of librarianship, education, and publishing lean overwhelmingly liberal-progressive.