On January 10, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to remove the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus from McMinn County’s eighth-grade curriculum. (News of this broke January 26—the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day.) The director of schools for McMinn County, Lee Parkison, cited the book’s “eight curse words” and the nudity of the mice (which, like some victims of the Holocaust, are stripped naked inside of a concentration camp). It may be tempting to dismiss the banning of a print book as silly and old-fashioned in the digital age, but censorship is an eternal danger in any democracy. So dangerous, in fact, that even the right used to be against it—or at least pretended to be.
It shouldn’t have come as a shock to me when the anti-cancel-culture warriors at Fox “News” had a rabbi on to defend the banning of the book, but it did. Right-wing pundits who spent months complaining bitterly when Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced they had stopped publishing six relatively unpopular books because they included some very racist illustrations were oddly silent when it came to the removal of Maus. Those same people who are so worried about the “cancellation” of Joe Rogan—the podcaster whose publisher, Spotify, stood by him, declining so far to alter his contract or his content, after Neil Young and others pulled their music in protest over him spreading COVID misinformation—aren’t very worried about removing books from libraries.
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