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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You guys can scream and shout about how publishing isn’t discriminatory against white men, religious people, straight people, etc all you want. You might even be telling the truth and of course it is nuanced. The world of high literary fiction is different than the world of romantasy which is different from short story, etc. I suspect that the actual story is a lot more complex and nuanced.

But the point is that perception matters here, and the perception is that education, libraries, and publishing have swung to the far left. So, many voters won’t see these actions as authoritarian. They’ll see them as correcting the excesses of the past decade. I do not agree with this myself, I am just saying what I think a lot of people think now.

Essentially this: if you or someone adjacent to you lobbied for books to be banned or restricted because they were allegedly hateful, or if you favored excluding authors based on identity, you don’t have a lot of ground to stand on as far as complaining about authoritarianism. You had a chance to stand up for free speech and you didn’t take it. [/quote]

I never lobbied for books to be banned. I don’t think middle schoolers should be reading Mein Kampf, but I’m not fighting to get it off public library shelves. If the library deaccessions it because people refuse to read it, it’s their right to keep the shelves stocked with things people actually want to read. The historians will keep their copies, it’s not going anywhere.

Libraries serve their readers. They buy books based on what they think people would want to read, and what people tell them they want to read. They regularly purge what isn’t being read. People want LGBQT kids books. People want diverse characters. People aren’t as interested in the old “classics” because some of them just not as relevant as they used to be. They were popular in their day but couldn’t speak past their generation. It’s all fine.

What’s not fine is stuffing the shelves with jingoistic crap in an attempt to push some notion of a right wing Christian nationalist America. Smart people don’t want to read it, stupid people won’t read it, and libraries will cease to be relevant. Which, now that I think of it, is exactly the point. [/quote]

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