This law is about what books are in public libraries. It is a counter to the push by teachers to socialize brown kids into having “brown people” ethnic identity. I’m a brown person with brown kids and I’m also furious at the (mostly white liberal) teachers who want my kids to think of themselves as “brown people.” I don’t know if you have kids but this push is very strong right now, especially in blue states.
I want my kids to be socialized like I was, with an American identity shared with their white neighbors. I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than they do with a random person in Appalachia. It’s a shallow, boring mindset and one that’s antithetical to personal success in American society. And frankly, all the “brown people identity” books for south asians are dreck written by losers who are still upset because some kid made fun of their lunch in elementary school. If my kids want to understand her roots, they can read a book about the Mughal Empire.
And it’s not just Florida. Trump won over 40% of asians and nearly 50% of hispanics last year. There is a larger debate amongst “brown people” themselves about how to socialize our kids and the liberal preference for identity politics is by no means universally accepted.
Beyond that, there is no shortage of people in favor of book bans that absolutely believe in ethnically-defined identity.
But what you have in schools today is an additional layer on top of that, where the non-white kids are treated differently than the white kids. The non-white kids are encouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to identify with the oppressed people in the books in a way the white aren’t. At my kids school, they have racially segregated “affinity” groups to facilitate this. My daughter was invited to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess that’s the math for a half white half south asian kid). I know that sounds like something I just made up but it’s absolutely true.
This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity. Specifically, they generalize african american racial identity and solidarity and politics to all non-whites. If you walk into a book reading for some of this stuff, you’ll find way more people promoting “brown people” ethnic identity and solidarity than you will find people promoting “white people” ethnic identity and solidarity at a Trump rally. The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
I'm not sure the best option is to vote for the country club guy whose public statements strongly indicate reports of his private statements on race are accurate. The guy who has kept Stephen Miller around for a decade and talked the proud boys into being the armed second wave of Jan 6. Then pardoned them.
Speaking for myself, even if Trump is somehow the shining light of a post-discrimination society (after failing to do so in his first term), it can't possibly offset the damage he wants to do the economy, consumer protection, and national security.
I definitely see your point around a lot of people trying to be so inclusive, they end up being somewhat racist. But I see this more of a lack of proper cultural empathy/education -- go figure, Dunning-Kruger is everywhere all the time. But as you said,
> This law is about what books are in public libraries.
So why would we ban the books, rather than encourage reading them and having the more meaningful discussions focusing on heritage rather than identity?
As a slightly more abstract aside, identity anything to me is a slippery slope because it will always automatically encourage one to make assumptions; it's a mental shortcut to say Person A == Person B iff PersonA.identity == PersonB.identity. Given that education is hard, learning is hard, and life is hard, I think we need to at least emphathize and appreciate that teachers and the the education system in general need to often fall back on these sorts of mental shortcuts. But that's we need to really invoke our right, privilege, and duty of grassroots participation. Why not walk into that book club that's overcompensating and help them learn what is making you uncomfortable? You might be surprised at how ignorant they were of their own mistakes and that they're willing to learn from your perspective.
But it’s not inclusiveness at all, it’s a caste system. In academic liberal spaces, non-whites are not “included” on the same terms as whites. We are bucketed into a separate caste subject to different standards and expectations. And that caste system plays out in routine social interactions, because white people afraid of being called “racist” will not treat you the same.
Calling it “heritage” instead of identity doesn’t change anything. Your average second-generation non-white American has weak ties to any non-american society. My kids have no meaningful ties to Bangladeshi society, only superficial ones. They can’t, and they wouldn’t even like it if they did. So the only outcome of talking to them about their “heritage” would be to encourage them to see themselves differently from their peers based on connections that are at best superficial.
As to your point about “banning”—we’re not banning the book club. This law is about school libraries. People are voting for what kind of ideas their children are socialized into, which is one of the fundamental rights as a parent.
You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community. Once people are allowed into the community, they get to participate in deciding how the community collectively socializes children. That means communities have a strong interest in excluding people who aren’t like minded.
"Strictly control[led]" is a line-drawing function — and needs to remember that life is a movie, not a snapshot, and so patience is needed. EDIT: Growing a society seems not unlike raising children: Society needs kids to grow into adults, and sometimes that means gritting your teeth and being patient ....
Example: Many of my own immigrant ancestors, those on the non-Aryan branches of our family tree, probably wouldn't have been let in under today's MAGA criteria. (Even my German-immigrant ancestors faced hostility from the "real Americans.") Yet each successive generation in this country has done just a bit better, thank you very much.
Example: In this morning's home-delivery Times, Cardinal Dolan is quoted as recalling about the decades-long progress of the Irish migration to America — who were definitely considered ubermenschen by many American nativists of the time:
<quote>
“He [19th-century Archbishop John Hughes] was frustrated about raising money,” remarked [Cardinal] Dolan, who wore Hughes’ pectoral cross on a cord around his neck as he described the new artistic addition. “He said, ‘This cathedral will be built on the pennies of immigrants.’”
Dolan noted that by contrast, raising $3 million to underwrite the creation, installation, lighting and conservation of the Cvijanovic mural took less than a day — paid for, he added with a chuckle, by “the big checks of the grandchildren of the immigrants.”
</quote>
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added; my first-generation Irish-American grandmother told of seeing signs here and there: No Irish need apply.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/arts/design/st-patricks-c...
In the end, if we’re just comparing anecdata, this isn’t going to be productive.
There’s dozens of other examples, of course. Admissions, hiring, and promotions are often subject to explicit or implicit racial considerations. It’s naive to believe that the same people who are required by institutional policies to think about your skin color when they hired you or admitted you or when they decided to promote you or give your a research grant aren’t thinking about it in daily interactions as well.
> The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
... there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
It'd be nice if the reasonable people from both parties could ignore their extremist wings, get to together, and realize they have more in common than different.
Actually, it's back to 1868[0] at least that they'd like[1] (rolling back birthright citizenship) to go.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
This is a relatively small number in comparison to the chunk of Harris supporters who would call color blindness “racist.” In my own experience, “brown” ethno-narcissism and ethnic tribalism is more accepted, and even encouraged, among liberals than white ethno-nationalism is tolerated among conservatives.
This is a result of the political incentives of the respective parties. Republicans don’t need white nationalism, they can win when minorities are assimilated into the what the dominant Anglo-American culture (what the left might call “multiracial whiteness”). That’s basically what’s happened in Florida: Hispanics retain their culture in the way Irish and Italian Americans do, but don’t have a strong ethnic identity that is politically motivating.
E.g. it's hard to get more racist than Stephen Miller, but I suppose that's normalized when you're on Jeff Sessions' staff.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stephen-mi...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-is-what-we-thou...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/stephen-millers-racist-email...
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/stephen-miller...
There are dozens of similar articles.
The folks at SPLC are cultural relativists. They think culture is just superficial things like food, and doesn’t contribute to material circumstances. The only reason India or Mexico are poorer and more disorderly, in their view, is oppression from whites. In that worldview, any opposition to immigration can only be based on skin-color “racism.” Is that your view?
I’m curious why you won’t answer my question. Does non-racism, in your view, require people to accept immigration that changes America’s culture? Is there a non-racist lane for people who want Vermont or Salt Lake City to remain culturally Anglo-American (regardless of ethnicity)?
If you want to emigrate to a place that is static then you will quickly find out that you can't, not really. Switzerland has been trying to do this since forever and is failing badly at it, other experiments in the same direction have led to civil wars and ugly offshoots like apartheid. You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
On one hand, this isn't true. At the national level, our laws and institutions are still predominantly Anglo, because all the Dutch, Germans, Irish, and to a lesser extent, Italians and Eastern Europeans, assimilated into that culture. On the other hand, the places where that is the least true, like Chicago and New York City, only underscore my point. Governance in those cities is terrible because much of the political bandwidth is consumed on issues of fairness and redistribution between groups that are at odds with each other instead of building subway lines or cleaning the streets.
> Your position is essentially statist: you want the world to stay the way you found it
Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States, instead of doing a massive "git pull" from the cultures that produced India or Mexico. If you worked at Google, would you hire tens of thousands of Kodak or GE lifers en bloc? Of course not.
> You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
If that’s the choice, I’d choose the latter.
But I don’t quite agree with the dichotomy. Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people. If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence. High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
> Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
Putting aside that this reads like a right-wing parody of WEF talking points, do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950? (Or your own homeland of the Netherlands prior to its experiment with mass immigration?)
Ask the native Americans whether or not this isn't true.
> Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States
That culture is built on violence, slavery, racism and oppression. Iterating on it seems to have brought out its worst elements rather than its best elements. Half the country, including you, voted for a caricature of what a decent human being should be like as president. And you are now 200 days into an assault on your economy and freedoms and you still refuse to see what the end game looks like. That culture? The 1950's are not coming back. And that's not a bad thing.
> Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people.
That's just one form of immigration, why stop there? What about refugees? Oh, right, the USA is good at waging war but then ignores the refugees that inevitably are created, that's for the rest of the world. Handy, being a continent sized country an ocean away.
> If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence.
Foreign influence is minimized by limiting the use of money in politics which is an easy avenue into the heart of the political system. Immigrants - as a rule - do not have the vote.
> High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
Small town America is a lot more racist than you think. They didn't so much end up assimilated, they ended up scared to go out of their houses. If you think you are assimilated and that small town America is accepting and nice you should try to live in the places with < 10,000 inhabitants where the White Master Race is the dominant majority. You'll see - very quickly - how they look at you.
Your USA experience is for the most part informed by living in the larger cities. I've spent a lot of time in rural America (~ a year in total) , easy for me to do since I'm white. What people say in private is hair raising, and really opened my eyes to how deeply embedded racism is in the United States.
> do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950?
I don't know about that. But I also don't think that the current political mainstream in the United States cares about orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic elements of the USA unless it benefits the 'in-group' to the exclusion of everybody else.
This whole discussion reminds me of a guy sitting on a branch cutting the live side with a saw while sitting on the dead side. All of those elements that you wish for have been put in place against massive pressure from the people that you support. And they'd love to go back to Massachusetts, 1950. But without you, and your kids. Your wife is - probably - safe. But you can bet that ICE showing up at your door - or your parents, for that matter - at 4 am is going to be very bad news. And they won't care who you voted for either.
As for that 'Dutch Experiment': it isn't limited to the Netherlands, and by and large the Surinam immigrants have disappeared into background noise on account of their relatively low numbers. But when they first came here (just before Surinam became independent) there was a lot of outcry about this. Now, so many years later there is still a fairly large number of people that identify as such here, most of them live in the three big cities, because of small town racism.
The predominantly Turkish and Moroccan immigrants have set up their own regional presence, some of them have held very strongly to their original identity and stepping into their homes is like stepping into a time/space displacement machine. But they - as a rule - are friendly, incredibly hard working and because they value family a lot more than the original inhabitants and their offspring tend to do, have a fantastic social network around them. Again, due to racism and very overt discrimination their kids have - for some fraction anyway - grown up frustrated. They see all this wealth around them and the skin color based ceiling is so strong that only very few of them manage to break through. The end result of this is that a fraction of them rather than being 'kept in their place' by the whites here - who think these people will never be successful and who deserve to work in crap jobs no matter how intelligent or capable they are. It will take many generations until this has reduced, but there is some - very slow - progress over time. I see more and more people with such backgrounds in positions of influence and some power and wealth and they are the beacons that the next generation will hopefully set course by. It will take many more decades until they are no longer pushed down as a group, and, unfortunately, they are not usually helping and neither are their parents. Intermarriage is rare, which would be one way to reduce the barriers between the various groups.
Romanians, Poles and other people from Eastern Europe have moved here in fairly large numbers. As a rule they are doing fine, even though the newspapers love to magnify the few cases where they are involved in legal or traffic issues.
Syrians and other refugees have not integrated well at all. They have been here only a very short time and are slowly displacing the older immigrant groups for the lowest income jobs. I've had very little interaction with them. But the various asylum seeker places that are dotted across the country are best compared with open air prisons where our bureaucratic engine driven by overt hatred tries to discourage them from staying here. There are far better ways of dealing with this but unfortunately my vote is only just as heavy as that of the racists. It will be decades more before these people too have made this place our home.
Ukrainians, who are here in surprisingly large numbers have integrated in record time. They have learned the language and have assimilated very quickly, to the point that you have to have an ear for it to spot them. They are everywhere and they seem to love it here. It helps that their culture and ours was already closely parallel, besides the Orthodox Church component which quite a few still formally subscribe to (religion, in NL, was on the way out until immigrants brought it back).
The consistent lane you're looking for is "let come those that will. give them all the freedoms and all the burdens of being American, and that's what they'll become. The character of our places might change, as they have in the past and as they will again in the future, but they will be no less American as long as they're full of people seeking liberty, justice, and the opportunity to better themselves and their families."
[1] and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
First, you're conflating America's effectiveness in Anglicizing immigrants with absorbing foreign cultures, which has happened surprisingly little. Our national institutions remain quite Anglo, even though there's pockets of different cultures all over the country.
Second, most good things about American culture trace back to its Anglo roots: https://scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outputs/book/Albio.... Legalism, orderliness, disposition towards freedom and free markets, entrepreneurialism, egalitarianism, etc.
Areas where we've seen cultural change have been negative. For example, one thing we've lost is the WASP austerity. I know some older folks from New England who grew up learning that "food is for fuel, not enjoyment." Amazing! It's a downgrade that we lost that!
> and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
No, it's Anglo-American culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tINJhf1Zs1Q&t=618s. The Anglo countries remain incredibly similar to each other culturally and economically despite the U.S. breaking off from England almost 250 years ago. America is different from England in many ways, but in more or less the same ways it was always different from England.
> This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity.
Beverly Bond, who holds the trademark, was an influencer avant la lettre. She wanted to make a brand—looks line like a clothing line, followed by a TV show, then a podcast.
I get that it’s tempting to blame everything on radical leftist academics or whatever but that’s not what happened here. This is simply capitalism.
You might believe that if an ideological Leftist motive can be kept separate from motives of personal enrichment, then it cannot do significant harm. But most US voters would disagree with you about that: they believe that it can be harmful to believe that there is an oppressive structure at the center of American society if in fact there is not an oppressive structure at the center of American society.
Your assumptions about my motives are incorrect.
“April 26 1992. There was a riot in the streets tell me where were you”
Well, um, yeah. That's because white people just aren't oppressed.
Its the same way I don't identify with feminist literature. I can read it, understand it, enjoy it - but I can never fully relate, because I'm not a woman and the way I experience the patriachy will always be different.
Of course black people identify with or relate more to something like the color purple. That doesn't mean the color purple is racist.
Then how can you evaluate feminist literature to be accurate?
Your experience in life will always represent a tiny tiny fraction of one percent of all experiences. If you require a "see it to believe it" approach, you will live and die closed-minded.
That does not mean I need to blindly trust feminists, however.
but then, maybe I can trust a statistically relevant sample of doctor on the basis they are objectively and scientifically trained, regulated and liable?
I'm guessing you aren't... people have to draw lines somewhere on this. There's a difference between restricting by age, making available to all and actually assigning material to children. Not all materials are appropriate for elementary school libraries. And I'm not even talking about The Color Purple specifically.
Also, none of this stops a parent from buying a book for their children they feel is appropriate for their child.
I think the law that the judge is ruling on here does not effect a ban of penthouse or similar material in elementary schools. The preexisting laws already had that kind of material banned in elementary schools.
Not everyone agrees as to where the line is for "common sense" and will definitely push boundaries beyond what a community would generally agree to. Laws at a higher level are just "common sense" codified.
Not all mountain out of molehill arguments need to be engaged with I think is the broader lesson we need for our times.
How did he do with African Americans?
Do you really believe history books are immune from book bans? Historically speaking, they’re usually first against the wall.
I wonder what PragerU has to say about it.
I can't find a single exit poll that says Trump won over 40% of the Asian American vote.
> I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than she does with a random person in Appalachia.
Nobody is claiming otherwise. They're only saying that on the narrow topic of racism, Trump and many (though certainly not all) of his supporters will treat your daughter differently than they do a random light-skinned Appalachian.
Your point about hypothetical racist Trump supporters is wrong for two different reasons. First, I’ve been to Appalachia, and my wife is from rural Oregon, and nobody has ever treated me differently. My brother in law (part black, part Samoan, looks like the Rock) went to a Trump rally and Marjorie Taylor Green came to him to introduce herself. In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Second, building a “brown people” identity around the possibility that someone will occasionally treat you differently is bizarre. I don’t claim that my experience as a brown guy (who has spent a lot of time in the rural south and rural west coast) is universal. But if my family and I haven’t noticed it, that suggests a ceiling on how pervasive it could be. It’s positively grotesque to encourage kids to construct an identity that doesn’t reflect them as individuals, because someone, somewhere, might occasionally treat them differently based on skin color.
For you there wasn't, and like you said earlier, there's no representative "brown person" experience. I have first-hand experience that's the definitely included an aftermath, one person stopped wearing hijab after being taunted, and another - who's not even muslim - started dying her hair a color much lighter that its natural color to better pass as white.
It's great that you haven't experienced racial discrimination. This hasn't been the experience of people applying for housing at Trump properties.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117470/documents/...
> In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Explain to me how putting up Confederate monuments is so we don't "erase history" but removing historical notes about Native Americans, not mentioning a holiday celebrating freedom for all Americans except to disparage it, and removing information about Trump's impeachment is not. I'd like to understand any other explanation than that Trump and his supporters don't see Native Americans or black Americans as "real" Americans, which is what people mean when they use the word "dehumanizing." Is there any other way to explain it than by using skin color? That is why "white liberals" (why are you bringing their skin color into it) bring it up — the only reasonable explanation involves skin color. Nobody in this thread is suggesting that anybody build an identity around it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-restoring-confederate-nam...
https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/5444429-racist-monu...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/juneteenth-trump-too-many-non-w...
https://www.kqed.org/news/12049405/muir-woods-national-monum...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/11/smit...
That means it could be 50%. “Exit” polls in general aren’t reliable, especially with the mail in voting. Pew isn’t an exit poll, it uses massive surveys. That’s consistent with other data points. Blue Rose Research found that Trump probably narrowly won naturalized citizens: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... Most of those folks are hispanic or asian.
Another data point: lots of majority asian precincts in new york and new jersey flipped to Trump. Trump outright won Flushing, Queens. Jamaica, which has a heavy Bangladeshi population, shifted from D+83 to D+31 (which would mean roughly 35% Trump).
And it could be 30, but you said for sure it is over 40.
> "Exit” polls in general aren’t reliable, especially with the mail in voting.
That's why all of them also do phone interviews, and that's how they're consistent with each other.
> Most of those folks are hispanic or asian.
We're talking about Asians. They are not even close to comprising most naturalized citizens.
> Jamaica, which has a heavy Bangladeshi population, shifted from D+83 to D+31 (which would mean roughly 35% Trump).
35 is less than 40.
The real dispute is what “dehumanize” means. Does it “dehumanize” my brown kids if schools shield her not fully developed brain from material meant to encourage them to develop “brown people” ethnic identity? I would argue it’s exactly the opposite: the constant stream of “ethnic studies” in schools these days is dehumanizing to brown kids.
Weird to have to define dehumanization but OK. Dehumanization is to deprive people of their positive human qualities. We're about to get political so this is likely way off topic at this point.
A common, recurring theme in Republican "culture war" rhetoric and policy is to carve out and target various groups (however they/we want to define that group), ignore those groups' positive qualities, amplify their negative qualities, and portray those groups as "lesser humans than us," ultimately for the purpose of depriving them of rights/freedoms/wealth/livelihoods/etc. Evidence of this target -> dehumanize -> disenfranchise cycle abounds. If we can't agree on at least that baseline, then there's probably no productive way to proceed with a discussion.
Yes, the other side divides and groups people, too, and we might not like that. But I'd argue it's for the purpose of uplifting already-vulnerable groups rather than knocking them down. I'd love to live in a world where nobody does this grouping, but we're obviously not there yet.
The only way to get there is to go there.
I remember back when I was a kid and realized anti-discrimination was the feel-good message hiding the real message to continue discriminating but now with the correct standards. I sat all day wondering what people 100 years from today would think of our current standards. I reasoned they'll be as forgiving to us as we are to people from 100 years ago.
The person from 1925 would argue they're better than someone from 1825. Ok, sure, but that doesn't make Jim Crow a good thing.
The contemporary standards on how to discriminate will always be justified in the contemporary social context. That's how the cycle perpetuates. The only way to get to the world where nobody does the grouping is to live that life as much as possible today.
We don’t agree on this. Republican efforts are focused on preserving the dominant American culture and norms, which we think are good. At least in the race context, what engenders backlash is not minorities having rights, but them coming together to assert distinct interests as a group to seek changes in the dominant culture.
> Yes, the other side divides and groups people, too, and we might not like that. But I'd argue it's for the purpose of uplifting vulnerable groups rather than knocking them down.
We agree on this. But I would submit that intent matters less than effect. For one thing, these “vulnerable groups” are less vulnerable than assumed. For example, Hispanics are economically assimilating with whites at about the same rate as Italians or Irish.
For another, the well-intentioned divisiveness itself harms minorities. Ethnic identity and solidarity is a toxic force minority communities. It hinders economic and social assimilation, and empowers bad actors within the community. I want to live in a community where, if a Bangladeshi commits a crime, the other Bangladeshis have more solidarity with the white police who come to arrest the criminal than with their co-ethnic. I think this is one reason why even poor Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in America have so much better economic mobility than their counterparts in Europe or Canada.
Unfortunately, neither side seems to be acknowledging or addressing that problem.
OP didn't say anything about non-white Hispanics and other non-white people as a group. He is not suggesting anything about a group identity there. He is simply stating the fact that Trump treats them differently because Trump sees them as a group, including removing books and history about these people.
This isn't to say that racism doesn't exist, but it's not nearly as big as most make it out to be, and there's far more anti-white hate than there is white racism today. White racism is absolutely outcast as a rule today and the typical Republican wants and has nothing to do with it.
But I'm not able to square that with what you said about ethnic identity.
Florida Hispanics see these trends as well, and one reason they overwhelmingly supported DeSantis for re-election is that’s not the worldview they want their own kids to have. They don’t want their kids to think of themselves as “Hispanic” (which is an artificial political construct anyway) and have teachers assign them books about how Hispanics are “marginalized.”
While this is a ground one should tread most carefully, surely you can see the historical precedents?
Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't look into the details. But it appeared to be a ban to me.
If all they did was say: "these are the books that must be made available at school libraries"
That would be very different, and we wouldn't be talking about a ban.
But if they specifically targeted certain books (who might have not even been at all the school libraries to begin with), and said here are the books that are not allowed to be made available... I mean, that's called a ban.
I support your desire to make sure your kids feel at home and are able to, like everyone else, consider themselves American. I'm from an immigrant family, and it bothers me when people ask "what am I", I'm American, and they're always like... Come on! What are you really? And it's like, dude, you're also 'not really" American, you're German, you're British, etc. Except we're all really American, born and raised.
So I'm with you on that point, and the "born and raise" part, yes it means you should be raised the same as well, raised American.
Where I'll have to disagree with you, is that the books made available and the school curriculum isn't about any of this. It should focus on education, kids shouldn't be dumb, they need to learn history and it's effects, they should engage with hard topics and real problems, they should be exposed to well reasoned and intelligent diverse opinions from all sides, etc. You don't achieve that by selectively banning books whose narrative you personally don't like.
If you came at me complaining that the current selection of books and curriculum goes against that, that it's pigeonholing kids into "brown" and "not brown", and so on, I'd be like, damn right that's a problem, and I'd put forward the same argument I'm making now for why it's an issue that needs addressed.
But like I said, banning books just feels like pigeonholing and propaganda the same that you're trying to avoid just someone else's agenda.
If you're in a grossly generic way referring to hispanics, african americans, Indian Americans and many distinct and complex others with less-than caucasian skin color, then i'd suggest you look at voting polls. A surprising number of people from these and other groups support conservative causes too. You going to claim they're all deluded idiots who need a progressive to tell them how they should think and vote?
Same for women. Millions of women are republican-leaning, or conservative in some way. It's not so idiotically simple as hur dur, the republs want to dehumanize women. Their politics on women's reproductive rights and other things are shitty in many ways, but they're more complex than your take.
All that said, this list of books proposed for bans is a laughable idiocy from people who really need to get their heads out of their asses. In the massively digitally interconnected 21st century, where nearly any information can be obtained at any time by nearly anyone, trying to ban things like "The Handmaid's Tale" or "The Kiterunner" for obscenity is absurd.
I’m sorry but singling out the “brown people” comment is a bit of a straw man in this case, as a “brown” person it kind of is really that simple. There really isn’t anything else to it, it is literally about the colour of the skin. Does it reduce countless cultures and experiences to nothing? Yes. But that’s sort of the point isn’t it.
No examples are given in original post..
It's cut and dry. Plain racism, broadly and slowly applied. Don't try to notice, they hate that.
> All that said, this list of books proposed for bans is a laughable idiocy from people who really need to get their heads out of their asses.
Ah yes, the foolish "state policy don't matter because you can get it somewhere else". Treating the issue lightly, is part of the problem. Now there's 1 less source BY POLICY and the noose tightens. Weaponizing policy is something politicians are prone to do.
I guess my point is that both are dangerous to freedom, and ideally the government would do something to curtail corporate censorship instead of encouraging it. That's the whole idea of a "common carrier"[1].
Plenty of people (including the vast majority of Republican voters) vote against their interests, yes. Whether it's single issue voting, misinformation, or a variety of causes, "some X vote for this group" does not mean that the overall group does not hate or work against X.
I was going to respond to my original comment but it was not only downvoted but also flagged. Good job on tolerating differences of opinion HN folks, acting like emotionally malformed children in your disagreements.
Republicans pass tax cuts which increase the burden on the poor and the middle class for the benefits of the ultrarich (not the majority of their voters).
They destroy government programs that benefit the majority of the population - health care, antitrust enforcement, free tax filing, environmental protections, tax audits of rich tax cheats.
They oppose any programs which provide benefits to the public - broadband standards, net neutrality, social services, cybersecurity, weather satellites, libraries, public schools, so many more.
The vast majority of their voters are hurt by these policies and are quite literally voting against their interests.
I wouldn't underestimate the role of bots, or bot assisted socks, rather than the HN community. You last sentence just sounds like sour grapes in this context.
FYI, this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901875
"Yes, conservative Latin American men like the male supremacy aspect of it"
is currently flagged. There is indeed a difference of opinion on HN, but also, sadly, rampant abuse of the flagging system.
-> Exactly. It refers to all of them.
It isn't a secret that white nationalist, kkk, are Republican, and have been at least since the 80's.
So as venn diagrams go, there are not many KKK in the Democratic party, and they are in the Republican party, so... who's ideas do you think align the most?
100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".
I don't really know who to vote for to stop stuff like this. No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech. Instead it's always about censoring your opponents and their ideas while you're in power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controvers...
Unfortunately when voting in the US there's currently no choice that avoids a general mentality of ideologically justified censorship.
TFA shows a clear and present case of a particular action taken by one political faction. Your argument, that the opposing faction is equivalent to a greater or lesser degree and would follow the same course of action, rests entirely on a hypothetical; it isn't supported by any concrete evidence or cited examples.
I'm certainly not asserting that any one faction/party holds a monopoly on moral high-ground, just highlighting that this kind of argument is frequently used as a tactic to deflect discussion away from ground truth considerations and shift the debate towards (artificially) neutral conditions.
It seems to me that you are disregarding the context? From up thread:
> No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech.
I did cite an example, at least indirectly, when I mentioned other countries. Consider the online speech measures in the UK as but one example. Not the same political party to be sure but the underlying ideology is shared. The only significant difference (IMO) is the presence or absence of first amendment protections.
I mean, they could as much as the fringe actors this article is about. I'm not sure what you think is stopping them from going for it in the same fashion.
Of course I would have expected the second point to apply to the GOP as well, yet here we are, so clearly my world model has some inaccuracies in this regard.
The massive difference between government censorship and private cooperation censorship is unlikely to effect how people feel and react to it.
I would regularly see stories on Reddit where someone was gifted one of the more borderline Dahl novels and they binned it rather than giving it their child. I'm sure their internal metrics were painting a similar picture.
That's bad for business. It wasn't change for social justice. It was change or watch your IP die and everyone involved still wanted the money.
You realize that's significantly better, right? Like at least two orders of magnitude better?
In one case, the copyright holder of Roald Dahl's books decided to censor (incorrectly, I agree) their own books which they own the copyright to. That's a private organization doing a stupid thing, making their own content worse. A private organization censoring their own words. No elected officials or persons appointed by elected officials were involved.
In the other case, the government is unilaterally deciding to withhold information from the public. The government is censoring other people's words.
You realize how that's not even remotely similar, right? "The left" is way better on this one.
(Feel free to substitute the situation with Dr Seuss books if Dahl isn't a fit because that organization also publishes originals, but even if the originals were still available, derived works are also censored)
- attempted illegal book bans
- suppression of right to protest and free speech on university campuses with lawfare
- US citizens being black bagged and deported to foreign concentration camps without due process and against court rulings
- deploying the army to the states unconstitutionally
- continued gerrymandering over the ruling of state supreme courts (Ohio)
Evidence for the Democratic party becoming more extreme:
- ... I'm struggling to think of an example, maybe you hold that prosecution of violent insurrectionists and their ring leader, the current president, was political extremism and authoritarian, but one would be so far detached from the reality-inhabiting community if so I don't know what to tell you.
In the case of the Dahl revisions, there is no official power being used to suppress individual preference. The publisher decided they wanted better sales for an older item, realized that things like anti-Semitism were unappealing to modern audiences, and created a new edition of their own property. Every part of that process was entirely voluntary and nobody’s purchased property is affected in any way – quite unlike the right-wing telling libraries to remove books with significant literary value which their patrons want to read.
These people are all dangerous in the extreme. It's just that the conservatives have unmasked themselves and displayed the extreme danger they represent to our ideals in the US in a far more open fashion than liberals.
Surely the Dahl's family censoring their own books is on progressives, and it's equally as bad as Republicans trying to overthrow an election, send the troops after protesters, build concentration camps on national territory, ban books, revoke women's rights to abortion, revoke civil rights...
Funnily enough, that's exactly what "obscene" means in popular parlance. On the other hand, the legal standard for what should be considered obscene is so inherently uncertain and varies so much across time and place that it's just meaningless to say anything that purports to be definitive about that.
I realize you're referring to some universal abstract theoretical concept of obscenity that doesn't apply or exist. The one I describe does, and I think that makes it more useful here.
Here is the text of the relevant decision, in case anyone would like to discuss that. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/413/15
There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.
The people supporting this political wave tend to be extremely triumphalist in their personal religious zeal, unwilling to make compromises, and are iconoclastic and disrespectful to most outside their in-group.
Much like other iconoclasts and zealots, they rely on the pluralistic principle of toleration to force the paradox of tolerance to bend their way.
It's shame - pluralism is much more invigorating and no one forces lifestyles they disagree with onto dominionists.
Reading your comment, I feel like the word religion is misleading. You see the same dynamic in how progressive political ideology, despite it not having to do with a god, has been introduced into many layers of government and other institutions. All the things said here can be demonstrated for the religious right but also the non religious left. It’s less about religion in my opinions, and more about how politics is about winning by controlling institutions instead of supporting individual freedoms.
Fundamentally, there are a lot of Republican policies which attempt to force Christianity or at least Christian morals down our throats, whether it be forcing women to have children, or posting the ten commandments in schools and government buildings, banning pornography, or preventing gay marriage.
I'm rather curious what Democrat policies are equivalent in your mind that would make you try and "both sides" this. And I mean actual passed or proposed policies -- not just bullshit you see from Hollywood and other media.
At minimum I feel like cancel culture ought to count.
What would the application of your test to the Chinese Cultural Revolution look like? That's a genuine question - I really am curious what your reasoning would be.
No, this is incorrect.
The cold reality is that the adherents pushing Dominionism push an unsustainable ideology, such that they would rather throw the US into religious-based fascism rather than recognize that when people are free they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants.
Even then, the statement "they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants" seems to apply in equal measure. The core issue here is that both major groups have ideologies that seek to impose on others.
I'll also note that your response of "no these two things are obviously different and one is not okay while the other is" is shared by the opposition. When you agree with the behaviors being imposed and the justifications for doing so it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would object.
A bit reductionist, but critically, and because you asked for clarity, Dominionists want to force others to stop doing what they don't like even though it has no impact on their life.
Easily understood if you look at the standard of medical care for many miscarriages. They are abortions.
Today in the US, abortion is mostly illegal in many states, and people have died due to liability and uncertainty that would otherwise not have died should the standard of care been followed. This is before you consider the harassment of women after receiving care.
Yet, Dominionists want it banned because their theology changed with political winds conveniently in the 1970s and they now feel strongly, even more so than your feelings-based opinion that the factual claim of non correctness is unjustified despite clear justification, that life is absolutely defined as a zygote. This is before we consider that they are also equally unwilling to help children post-birth or to adopt sound economic policies to encourage household and family formation.
Tell me, what polity or power is forcing Dominionists to receive abortions unwillingly?
Or is it that they forget that their rights end at my nose?
---------------------------------------
> I'll also note that your response of "no these two things are obviously different and one is not okay while the other is" is shared by the opposition. When you agree with the behaviors being imposed and the justifications for doing so it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would object.
You know, I hear conservatives say this all the time, but me being an old school minarchist Libertarian, I just want people to leave each other alone.
I'll note that now several times in this discussion you implicitly assert that anyone contrary to Dominionism is "progressive" (strawman designation by rightwing propaganda for outgroup, or actual political group, hard to say), and that if a specific behavior is called out, well, there must be some behavior the other party feels should be imposed on them.
No one cares about someone worshiping at their house of worship and engaging in their rituals. Not a bit. But come in and force someone else to hold their particular social club in high regard in order to engage in commerce, education, or careers? That's what Dominionists want. And it's an egregious violation of everything the US stands for to everyone outside the Dominionist camp.
------
Now, please specify what progressive philosophy or policy planks that you think Dominionists find so unappealing that they'd be willing to sacrifice the freedoms so many US service members have died for, and how that is _imposed_ on said Dominionists?
These are not just literary classics, they carry a specific culture forward. People whose values are threatened by that culture need to not engage with them. They do so by finding things to be offended by in the books. In many cases the offence is perfectly genuine. It is caused by cognitive dissonance, and not cynical manipulation.
That doesn't make it less frustrating. But understanding why people have trouble with these works helps build empathy for them. And empathy is necessary to present your points in a way that is persuasive to their views. Yelling in anger at them is easy. Actually changing their minds is far harder. And it does require trying to understand.
Stop defending tyranny.
No need to have empathy for anyone who doesn't have empathy for others.
I mean, didn't Elon just finish saying that empathy is the problem?
Also,
you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy.
what we used to call that in the Marines, was "intel". Not "empathy". And that designation of the information you outlined made us surprisingly effective at combating opponents.
I know. Inappropriate since this is not a military issue.
Just sayin' tho'.
> Um, what we used to call that in the Marines, was "intel". Not "empathy". And that designation of the information you outlined made us surprisingly effective at combating opponents.
This is the important part. Understanding "the root causes for the desires of your opponents" is not empathy. It's understanding something.
Empathy is a relating to anothers plight. If you only understand it then there is nothing to cause pause before using that understanding to your advantage. It's a core part manipulation and deception. If the only thing that happened with that understanding is seeing what you can get from it or that there is nothing you want there or have use for, then that doesn't really help bring two sides together.
Having the ability to relate to this understanding of another is when empathy happens. It's the empathy that gives one pause long enough to see there are other options that are not zero-sum.
> No need to have empathy for anyone who doesn't have empathy for others.
Disagree. Just because someone else can not relate -- now -- does not mean they can not later. I personally don't care for tit-for-tat games, thats simply a race to the bottom. Boundaries are the things missing here; one can have empathy for another that does not have it for them, that doesn't mean you also have to have a bleeding heart for them and let them walk all over you.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJX28l54YxE for an hour-long interview between a well-known conservative Christian and a liberal atheist exactly on the topic of the importance of having conservative Christians treating those they disagree with with empathy.
Not true, I see it constantly deployed to the not-right-wing side. Constantly and pretty much everywhere where left of center and center mix.
> It comes as no surprise that you would have never seen such messages delivered to conservatives if you don't spend a lot of time in places where this might happen.
I did read conservative writings, forums and what not. It is indeed rare in that space. Center is simply not invested in telling conservatives to have empathy as much as they are invested in promoting empathy toward conservatives.
> for the simple reason that the reaction to it tends to be bad.
I do agree that overall in aggregate it is increasingly clear it was bad advice. And the one sided application did not helped.
You as an individual are not required to do this if you don't want to, but if a movement wants to be successful then a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success.
To have empathy with a view is not condoning it
From my point of view, you don't reason with immature children, you give them a time-out. You don't hand them weapons of mass destruction.
It can also be used on bad faith actors by giving you better avenues of winning over the audience - which is the only real point of continuing a conversation with one.
popular vote for president
nonpartisan redistricting of every state
ranked-choice-voting everywhere
limits on corporate money in politics
end the filibuster
strictly define supreme court size, terms, and appointment rules
age limits for congress
finish reconstruction
mess with texas
there is a lot of technical debt in this project
If you are personally not capable of attempting empathy, that's fair. As I said, it is frustrating and hard. But a political culture where nobody attempts empathy is what has allowed grifters playing up the resulting culture war to gain political power, and put themselves in a position to aim for a dictatorship. If everyone keeps doing the same old, same old, the totalitarian outcome is guaranteed.
I'll make this concrete. Right now, many in Trump's base are dissatisfied with the handling of the Epstein affair. As much as you may disagree with a random Republican, the odds are that your differences are not as important right now than winding up united against the idea of an authoritarian pedophile running the country. But if the only emotion that they get is anger about all of the areas where there is disagreement, they won't have anywhere to go but back to Trump.
Is that outcome really what you think is best?
For now. And, if these would-be book-banners have their way, not for long.
Re-read the comment that you replied to, and find out where I said the same thing.
Most of these would-be book-banners do not actually want to create a totalitarian state. They honestly believe that they live in a democracy that was hijacked in 2020. They are being walked into accepting dictatorship on the principle that you have to fight fire with fire. When you meet them with fire, you're confirming the world-views that make them useful tools for Trump and co.
If anything we actually have the 1st amendment to stop democracies from going too far!
A great salesperson I learned from would often say something like "don't fight the resistance, join the resistance" with the implication that one must see through the other party's eyes before you can have a chance to really affect them. One must make them feel heard and understood rather than fought against.
The actual enemy only has power because useful fools are willing to follow them. Treating those useful fools as enemies is a key part of the dynamic that grants the actual enemy power.
I am advocating learning how to talk with those useful fools, and assist them in finding paths away from being the power base for the actual enemy.
(sidenote: I said "tools", as in they're disposable means to an end. I'm not sure if you called them fools because you misread my comment or you switched to that term to try and placate me).
edit: actually, I think that my sidenote goes to the core of our disagreement. In your view, there are 77M battles to fight and if you manage to win just a few percent of those to your side, things can be stopped. In my view, 95% of those voters no longer matter. The party is now in power and has full control over all branches of government and media. There is no way they will relinquish power over such a minor technical detail as an election. They only need a few million jackboots to maintain the status quo, the rest is disposable.
>Stop defending tyranny.
I think you miss GP's point. It's not that they support such book bans or the ideology that encourages that and other anti-democratic (small 'd') nastiness. Rather it's the old saw that 'you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (balsamic vinegar excepted).'
While there are many who are callous, cruel pieces of shit, there are more who live (without their knowledge or consent -- cf. rural broadcast media landscape, online bubbles, etc.) in an "information" environment that promotes such stuff as "godly" and "American" and "freedom", when that's not even close to the truth.
Which is clear from the book bans, the ridiculous "anchor babies" trope, the Democrats are all communists and on and on and on.
Yes, folks who actively foment this stuff and cynically (or even genuinely) fight to reduce liberty need to be resisted. Strongly and loudly.
But if you adopt those folks' "othering" tactics, you devalue everyone who doesn't specifically agree with you and everything you believe as evil and unredeemable, you remove a key opportunity for education, positive experience and persuasion.
Will that work for everyone? Absolutely not. But we don't need everyone, just the ones who are honest and fair-minded. And those can certainly be those who disagree with you.
If you exclude the radical reactionaries, bigots and cynical scum who seek to profit from promoting such ideas, the majority of all of us agree about much more than we disagree.
Perhaps that's something we all should ruminate on.
And if you can’t afford to buy them, then what?
Public libraries exist to serve a public good and are not just quaint anachronistic equivalents of amazon.com
There is no genuine offense here, they don't even know what the books are about other than someone saying "its LGBT". It is just cynical manipulation and hate.
As I said, their identity is such that they need to avoid engaging with these works to maintain it.
That doesn't mean that their outrage isn't genuine.
I strongly believe that for many people just doing this is causing them to dig into their heels and instead of examining themselves they are pushed to being on the defensive trying to say they are not racist, homophobic, sexist, whatever. Which is not getting us anywhere and is just making both sides angrier.
There are the extremes, people that have the power that are pushing things like this. But then there are the manipulated. Those that are being told lies and being encouraged to vote a certain why because they simply are only seeing part of the picture. Maybe they don't have exposure to the world. Whatever.
While I do respect someone's right to protect their own mental health and not want to engage in a conversation with many of these people, these conversations do need to happen. I truly believe that the majority of people are nowhere near as vile as those in power right now are. So we need to understand why they are enabling them.
That being said...
It is a very fine line. Too much empathy can lead to them thinking that this is ok, there does need to be some force in a push back against what is happening right now. Pushing back on the misinformation that is causing many people to hold these views.
So yes we can try to understand where these views are coming from without giving them weight as being valid.
People who are trying to harm my friends and family don't deserve any of my time and effort.
My biggest issue is not the lack of contact, it is the demonizing. Using blanket terms like "if you voted for trump your racist, homophobic, sexist, etc" when I just simply don't think that is a valid blanket statement and is really just a "feel good" statement for us to justify not hearing why they might have done something.
I do think that we are actively pushing them to be more extreme with blanket statements like this and it isn't not actually helping.
We can keep calling them names all we want but the fact is they are still voters that are enabling what we all have to deal with. Either we acknowledge that or we just keep repeating the same pattern we have been repeating since at least the 70's. A little bit of progress followed by a regression.
No, I don't. Not when the other side just openly uses lies (that they know to be lies) like "post-birth abortion" to argue their cause.
They're not discussing things in even a modicum of good faith. Saying that I have some moral imperative to engage with them as if they are is horseshit.
Absolutely. Although I'd point out that in many states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, those on the "other side" (you know, our fellow Americans), often by large majorities, rejected abortion bans in their states after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So it's not really as cut and dried as you make it out to be. Yes, there are absolutely those who despise the idea of the agency of women, and there are absolutely those who exploit that for monetary and political gain.
But a majority of Americans don't and even many of those who aren't on board could be persuaded to a live and let live position.
Politics is, after all, "the art of the possible." If we just demonize and "other" anyone who doesn't specifically agree with us, then nothing is possible -- only dysfunction and hate. That's not a world I want to live in.
You are refusing democratic process and arguing that media deems people unable to partake in it. This is not even Nazi ideology, this goes way, way beyond Nazism in terms of authoritarianism.
I do grant that it is very hard. Just as it is hard to have a rational conversation with a cult member. But the fact that it is hard doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.
Related to that though is the fact that authoritarianism has slowly become more prevalent over the past few decades, and it's easier than ever for people to get into cliques and echo chambers that never challenge their beliefs. That's resulted in a decrease in skills in truly changing people's minds about things, since in an echo chamber it's easier to just kick out anyone who disagrees, and if you're kicked out it's easier to just create your own echo chamber that espouses your belief than to convince people in the other echo chamber. This naturally leads to authoritarianism where an echo chamber believes that they're right and everyone else's incorrect opinions should be suppressed. When that community pops out of their echo chamber and tries to change everyone else's beliefs, it's only natural for people to respond with the best way they've learned how: refuse to engage.
I absolutely understand the desire not to engage with Nazis. But, ignoring Nazis is definitionally not going to do anything to fix the root of the problem
or any monarchy, or any theocracy, or any oligarchy.
I understand why you cite Nazism, or Soviet communism (or Mao Communism), but the French Revolutionary Government lasted less than 3 years, was at war with half of europe because their King decided to declare war for no reason, and had to find who fed intel to half their enemies (and even when the King's letters to his brother in law describing eastern troops movement were discovered, 10% of the parliament voted against his destitution and 40% against killing him for treachery). I'd say that they stopped the violence and decided to free all slaves once the war ended should be a point in their favor.
I believe the term got popular around the time Trump got his wall by saying he was going to make Mexico pay for it. Suddenly nobody questioned the sanity of building a wall anymore, the entire narrative was about whether or not he’d get Mexico to pay.
also stats on book reading are notoriously cooked, look at how many books publishers claim the median American reads.
To put it plainly, this attitude is probably the main reason reading books is sometimes labelled as an elitist poser passtime.
Kids will enjoy reading books that are genuinely good, but they need to care about the subject in the first place and they'll come for more on their own term. Focusing on the numbers ("X books per months") or denigrating the other things they also enjoy solely based on the format will just signal no shit is given about the actual content.
Trying to give grades to kids for Oscar Wilde's work is fully against the spirit of his thinking. Trying to grade kids for a whole lot of modern "classics" also goes against the spirit of their thinking. Joyce was too busy writing horny smut to be a supporter of literary analysis of his work.
But more seriously, most young adult fiction is pretty low quality. I cringe pretty hard when I look back at what that genre had us reading at the time. Percy Jackson and Eoin Colfer are poster children for the millennial brain rot that ended our collective love of YAF. We are a far cry from the high point it hit under the excellent writing of a certain Brian Jacques
Properly defining how we educate children is tough.
Joyce's penchant for scatology in no way diminishes his canon's suitability for engagement via critical theory. If anything, the poststructuralist interdisciplinary approach is as natural a bedfellow for the interpretation of Ulysses of Finnegan's Wake as one could hope for.
To demean Eoin Colfer is another interesting hill to die on (Darren Shan?). Benny and Omar is a fantastic debut novel and a great introduction to class and cultural distinctions in the Islamic world as viewed through the eyes of a surly western teenager. The Artemis Fowl debut as well is a perfectly inoffensive fresh IP with an interesting take on putting a cyberpunk spin on Irish Mythology - although marred somewhat by an appalling cinematic adaptation.
To then cite Brian Jacques as a high-point, ploughing a furrow as he does in the foothills of mid-brow K-12 readership, only suggests to me somebody completely unfamiliar with the canons of Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman. In any case, you seem to be conflating Young Adult Fantasy with the rich and well populated canon of Young Adult Fiction.
It's possible that the worst of these bans were done in strategic bad faith in partnership with the plaintiffs: to provide standing and legal cause for the plaintiffs to sue.
There may have been bans made that were reasonable but politically one-sided (perhaps an illustrated kamasutra, just to give an example), and the strategy to re-establish them was a sort of reverse motte-and-bailey -- get things that are far more innocent banned in a bid to sue and reverse all bans.
Those with any form of power in very large measure (money, fame, political power, influence) ought not to be trusted implicitly.
Sort of like adding "Common Sense", "The Grapes of Wrath" or "The Pentagon Papers", etc.
The side effect of this is that some literary classics will enjoy a brief surge in popularity among young people.
Reasonable people wouldn't ask to get these book banned. What if people colluding with the publishers got them banned as part of a larger strategy?
I have no evidence to support that hypothesis; it's just very odd for literary classics to have been banned.