Ever notice how it’s never progressives banning books? True fact: being progressive means book banning is anathema to you. Instead, progressives ban hate speech because hate speech undermines a diverse, democratic society. It is a literal assault upon others. Conservatives by contrast ban books because they hate what’s inside them – ideas and ways of thinking different from their own. That’s why they stick with the tried and true. It’s a fact: conservatism can’t innovate anything because innovation itself is the death of conservatism. To conservatives, books are the tip of a terrifying iceberg. What really scares them are the ideas beneath any book’s surface. To them, that’s the real nightmare.

Here in America, conservatism is a white bastion. Whiteness itself – that’s what American conservatives (and conservatism) want to conserve. Book banning is white culture asserting itself.

Europeans arrived in the Americas thinking their religious faith and culture, their science and military hardware made them superior to Native Americans. The truth is while London and Paris were sad little shitholes, vast, complex and technologically superior cultures thrived in the Americas. The only real advantage Europeans brought on the boats with them were their pathogens. European germs wiped out America’s Native peoples, not European culture or military might.

If not for their pathogens’ brutal lethality, Europeans would have encountered far stiffer resistance everywhere they made landfall.
The Europeans would have had a far harder time establishing a beachhead from which to conquer the continent. Without their germs, Europeans’ guns and steel were far less impactful.

How To Screw Up Democracy

Europeans brought a good idea to the America’s: democracy. They didn’t invent it however. And, being arrogant Europeans, they screwed up a ton of things at the jump because of their arrogance. America’s founders may have written “All men are created equal” but they didn’t mean it. How could one equal man can own another? That contradiction’s still killing us.

A chunk of America – let’s call it a third – has never actually been down with democracy. They’ve always been down ON it. From their POV, the problem with elections is, you could lose them. White America has always dreaded this time – when white people stopped being the majority of Americans. When our diversity became our most important feature. And our future.

It’s the very rare book banner who’s actually read any of the books they want banned. That’s kinda the point – right there. Reading the book – opening your mind to what’s inside it – invariably leads to new thinking about the subject.

And, once new thinking has started, innovation can always happen. That, right there, terrifies conservatives.

This is why conservatives will always be restricted to tried and true solutions to our problems – even when the tried and true are dismal failures. Either you’re willing to think outside the box or you aren’t. There’s no middle ground. And once you’ve developed a fear of outside the box thinking, you will be doomed.

In the end, conservatives will reduce all thinking to a cold recitation of talking points. Having successfully banned books, they will set their sights on the “next frontier’ of repressive governance: banning ideas themselves.

Or as conservatives will call em: “nightmares”.