▪️There is ~ a 0% chance that any of these books are banned from your local library, and today, if anyone was banning most of these, it would come from the left. But the whole “banned book” hoopla is a sham to begin with, here’s the truth behind it.
▪️These aren’t “the most banned books.” Some of them appear on the American Library Association’s (ALA) list of classics that have been banned or challenged. But most examples they give are from decades ago, often in other countries.
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics
▪️For example, the most recent “banning” of To Kill a Mockingbird they cite is from 2007 in a NJ school, where a resident “feared the book would upset black children reading it.” But it was retained, no ban. In fact, they cite no instance of it being banned in any US library.
▪️The examples the ALA give of Animal Farm being banned were in Moscow and The United Arab Emirates. It turns out when you dig into the ALA’s “banned book lists” they almost exclusively mean books that are challenged, not banned in the US.
▪️Which is why their list is called “most challenged books,” not most banned. They take any instances of people challenging a book to their local school board or city council (usually calls to move them to age appropriate areas or sections) as challenging.
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
▪️The ALA doesn’t have any real examples of books being banned, otherwise they would have an actual banned book list! Instead, they dishonestly call it “banned book week” and when you click on their “book ban data” it brings up “banned and challenged books” and if you read carefully you notice it’s all challenges and no actual bans.
▪️Hidden in their own methodology the ALA thankfully admits:
🔹 “ALA does not consider weeding of an item based on criteria defined in a library or school district's policy to be a ban, nor do we characterize a temporary reduction in access resulting from the need to review materials to be a ban.”
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/book-ban-data#methodology
▪️Thus, since the vast majority of “bans” in the news are simply schools removing or moving books due to school policies on explicit content and age appropriateness, there are no real bans they can cite. But they call it “banned book week” anyway, and get millions to go along with it.
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
