Review by yavoyavo

I watched this to see if they had anything new to say about the subject, my skepticism wasn't disappointed. The idea that books are banned is a modern progressive piety when the boomer "banned books" reading list is required syllabus reading, and even that has under their influenced waned to the point where it is more likely a kid has read Harry Potter than 1984, never mind anything harder like Solzhenitsyn.

The books in the documentary are all found in big box stores, "my 2 gay penguin dads", they are so not banned they are corporate approved, we are long past the point where Tipper Gore was putting warnings on rap music in Walmarts. It boils down to this, they are not afraid that children won't be exposed to the distilled thoughts of great thinkers through the ages, they are afraid they won't be exposed to what is little more than dumbed down coomer self affirmation ideology, selfie culture grade affirmation literature of crass self obsession and nothing higher.

None of this is about teaching kids how to think, but its the idea of the kid who reads, the kid who repeats the correct opinions for the pleasure of their librarians or teachers.

It was too much to hope this would have some critical examination, at 26 minutes it just flips from quote to quote from their book selection like a chain of tiktoks no depth at all, a low bar for agitprop in 2023.