▪️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.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
...
