There's No Such Thing as 'Banned Books'

Except the ones they're targeting.

Happy Banned Books week, everyone! You can celebrate by checking out from your local school or public library one of the books in question, or swing by your Barnes & Noble, or if you’re feeling lazy, get one off of Amazon.

Banned. In the words of the Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Recently, Randi Weingarten “celebrated” Banned Books week with a photo,

It’s worth talking about the book in her right hand, by Roald Dahl. As it happens, our family just read James and the Giant Peach last month. We bought a second box set because news had broken that Dahl’s work was being changed to make it more “sensitive.” The Guardian reported back in February,

Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.

Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.

Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.

Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.

In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Weingarten is pretending that Dahl is one of the authors being targeted by right-wing authoritarians, gaslighting us into believing that progressives are the defenders of free speech and literature. She may want to alert her ideological team that Dahl is being included in “Banned Books” week because of actions they themselves are taking. Dahl is one of the only authors who has any room to complain. Well, he’d complain if he wasn’t dead, anyway.

Kids’ horror author R.L Stine is alive, and is calling out what he views as censorship as edits have been made to his Goosebumps series. The New York Post reported in March,

The 79-year-old horror author spoke up after The Times of London claimed that he had “censored over a dozen of his books” to avoid mentions of race or calling characters fat or crazy.

“This story is false. I have never changed a word in a Goosebumps book,” Stine stated firmly to a report accusing him of “re-editing the books to appease The Woke.”

Instead, the changes were made behind his back, Stine said in response to an angry reader who accused him of being “shameful” for supporting censorship.

While Dahl and Stine have seen their work hacked apart by these censors, the only truly banned books belong to Dr. Seuss. Try to find these six titles:

The titles are:

• “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street”

• “If I Ran the Zoo”

• “McElligot’s Pool”

• “On Beyond Zebra!”

• “Scrambled Eggs Super!”

• “The Cat’s Quizzer”

It’s practically impossible.

In 2021, the business that supposedly preserves the author’s legacy stopped printing them because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

I would challenge you to flip through these books to find what’s actually questionable, but they are now impossible to find. They haven’t just stopped printing them; they are unavailable on used book resale sites, in used and new bookstores, in libraries, and in schools. This business, run by individuals with no biological relationship to Seuss, has thrown Seuss’s memory and his work into the woodchipper because of a few exaggerated illustrations that offend a handful of people in the modern era.

While progressives have appointed themselves the champions of banned books, they are the censors, all while going to the mattresses to defend literal pornography.