Censorship proponents have nationalized their earlier library obsessions

Episode Summary 

There’s so much news going on nowadays that it’s impossible to keep up with everything—in Minnesota, DC, and elsewhere. But authoritarianism is on the march in many places, including possibly in your city or state, where extremists haven’t just continued their interest in censoring schools and public libraries, they have expanded them to include universities, museums, and scientific research.

This is extremely un-American stuff, and yet sadly, it is being marketed in just the opposite way. Censorship advocates are weaponizing patriotism, concern for children, and political fairness to crack down on the free speech of people they don’t like.

Back on the show to discuss how and why this is happening, and to provide some arguments for free expression that activists can utilize is Jonathan Friedman, he’s the Managing Director of the Free Expression program at PEN America, a wonderful organization that promotes free speech and literacy which just released a new report about government censorship of college professors and students.

The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Related Content

--America’s libraries and schools are facing an epidemic of censorship (Friedman’s previous TOC appearance)

--Censorship was always a core demand of early reactionary activists like William F. Buckley

--The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the false equivalence of criticism and censorship

--How misinformation against ‘cancel culture’ was used to build an opposing politics of censorship

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

11:22 — Censorship laws are deliberately vague to maximize fear and compliance

13:22 — Living in fear of non-compliance

17:48 — Supposed advocates for ‘Western values’ are now censoring classic authors

23:42 — Does censorship actually work though?

27:11 — Fake free speech absolutism

33:44 — Responding to the ‘parents rights’ canard

40:32 — America’s declining global reputation under Trump

43:38 — Responding to false ‘patriotism’ arguments

48:51 — The value of literacy and reading

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So lot has happened since you were on the program in 2022. And not a lot of good things in terms of free speech and free expression. Let’s, and I, think, and there’s been challenges both last time it was challenges at the state level primarily.

But now we have federal issues as well. What are some of the biggest things ongoing right now that maybe that have been passed in the past several years in your view? And then we’ll go from there.

JONATHAN FRIEDMAN: Sure. Well, I think starting in 2021 we saw, something new. Which were what we called at the time, educational gag orders. There were these proposals being passed into law in a few states that sub to constrain how it is that teachers could talk about certain issues.

And a lot of the language that was originally in these laws a few years ago was very vague, but. was also vague in its implications. So they would say, here’s a list of concepts that teachers can’t talk about. And, in a lot of states it was unclear to what extent it would apply, for example, to professors at colleges and universities as compared to K to 12 teachers, which is more clear.

And from that, moment in time, what we’ve seen is, a lot of activity. Kinda build on that idea. The idea being that the government should extend new control in one way or another over public education. Some of that has taken new shape in higher education proposals to [00:04:00] not just exert control over what academics might teach college age students, but for example, to kind of undermine the entire operation of colleges and universities, for example, weakening the power of faculty to set curriculum or setting new rules like we’ve seen in Texas about certain topics that can’t be taught in an college level class at all.

And then in K to 12, what we’ve seen is an ongoing effort to apply these restrictions, not just to classrooms, but to school libraries and to also come up with new mechanisms that essentially may not be forms of direct. Prohibitions telling people what they can’t teach, but they function as such.

For example, empowering parents to have rights over what their own students might be able to access in a school, but thereby. And this is key, thereby censoring that material for everyone. And this is a very, I mean, it’s, it reflects a really challenging aspect of public education in this country that, that doesn’t necessarily have easy answers.

what is the role of public education vis-a-vis parents and students. But I think when you step back and you see, The whole picture, the effort to control higher education, the effort to, restrict K to 12 education.

It’s inevitable to come to the conclusion that at a very baseline, we are at an unprecedented moment for what we might think of as. The freedom to learn in public schooling, public universities, the freedom to ask questions, the freedom to talk about current events, the freedom to recommend books, the freedom to relate to students about things that are current topics in their lives. All of this is being narrowed. All of it is being undermined.

All of it is being chilled so that now, if a teacher is thinking [00:06:00] about going to see a, theater play, a performance, they’re gonna be much more nervous about. any possible content that might upset anybody, and what that means is it’s all driving toward this kind of lowest common denominator, meaning, the thing that everybody can agree on, and if nobody can agree on much, then suddenly you can’t teach anything anymore.

And so if to start to recognize that as uncomfortable as freedom can be, at times, it is a better alternative than sort of continuing to narrow and restrict. What it is that we can talk and think about all the time.

SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. And we’re also seeing a lot of restrictions and censorship on museums and government employees, particularly scientists as well, like a list of, words that are going to get you flagged if you have them in your grant proposal for scientific research. And extensive.

Censorship of museum exhibits, including one just recently where they ordered the removal of information about the fact that it was George Washington, I think, wasn’t it, that he

had

FRIEDMAN: in Philadelphia? Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, like there are these efforts over many years too. Improve, improve the story of. History in this country and prove the narrative of what people think they, what people, can grasp about the past to make that information more accessible. And what we are seeing is an effort to roll that back, to say that, that those narratives ought to be essentially erased even if they are true. if, they don’t make us feel good, let’s say whoever that us is, us being people in power, and that’s a very, that’s a very particular idea and approach to history and to the nation and its role in history, right?

To say that the purpose is the purpose, truth is the purpose is deeper understanding. Is the purpose to [00:08:00] ask questions or is the purpose. Well indoctrination or to have to propagandize to narrow what it is that people have access to. So yeah, we’re seeing this go way beyond schools and universities where I think it began, and it’s been happening also in all kinds of institutions, cultural, artistic institutions for years, museums will tell you they’ve been more and more nervous actually about. School visits because of, what parents might complain about in a museum. And if you think about like, art in a museum and you have a parent who wants to ban books that have anything to do with nudity, well they’re probably gonna find something to complain about in a museum.

So this kind of sense of, that every cultural or artistic institution should operate on eggshells, that every educator should operate with that mindset, it’s really gonna be damaging long term.

SHEFFIELD: It really is. And I mean, effectively this. Is kind of the, they’re, trying to institutionalize the heckler’s veto. Can you talk us about that for people who haven’t heard that term, tell, us what that is.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, that’s a, it’s a really useful way of thinking about this. The heckler’s veto is the idea that. If you have maybe someone who’s giving a speech to an audience and one person in the audience heckles, they will interrupt, take down the event, heckle it to such an extent that they veto the experience of everybody else who came and who wanted to participate in.

And we’re seeing that kind of veto exercised in a lot of different ways. On the one hand, we’ve seen that. On campuses for many years with speakers, across the political spectrum. This idea that someone’s speech or what they’ve said in the past or what they might say now is so offensive that, we should make the decision for everybody that no one should be able to hear it.

We should stop and shut down the event from happening. And, turns out nobody across the political spectrum, has an exclusive right to that tactic. ‘cause we’re seeing it all over the place. But the [00:10:00] other thing is that we are seeing government, adopt that kind of heckler’s, veto, government enabling it, government encouraging it in a lot of places.

And so, that’s what I was referring to before with the school library. and what we’ve seen with book bans all over the country is that sometimes you just have one individual who may have challenged. A thousand books or a hundred books or whatever it is. And especially when school districts adopt rules that they will remove books from circulation when and if they are challenged, what it means is it’s very easy to get a whole lot of books removed just by challenging them. And the more you dig into that phenomenon, you discover that the challenge forms are sometimes half filled out. They’re filled out with falsehoods, they’re filled out with things that don’t make sense. I, one of my favorite examples was a. A book which contained the poem by Amanda Gorman, which she read at President Biden’s inauguration.

And like, I don’t know at what age someone should be able necessarily to read that poem, but the point is it was in a school library, but the person who challenged it said the book was by Oprah Winfrey. I mean, it just like, not, you’re not even really accurately filling out this form in a very sensible, straightforward manner.

So. The more the more the phenomenon has been excavated, the more clear it’s been that it has been replicated across state lines and that often you see those kinds of mistakes repeated.

Censorship laws are deliberately vague to maximize fear and compliance

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And another key, component to this, which these people who are challenging books are, some of the many people who were doing this. Is that these laws, in many cases are deliberately vague in a way that is designed to chill speech that is that they get more of an effect than, they could legally get.

Because they know that if they’re too detailed, then it would get struck down as an explicit violation of the First Amendment. But if they make it vague, then it will stand a [00:12:00] chance.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, in some ways there’s been this embrace of the vagueness, and we see that time and again that state legislators for example, when given the opportunities to make laws more clear prefer not to. So, one that I’m reading today in Florida is a new bill that would ban the phrase the West Bank from all official government materials.

I think that’s the phrasing and. You have to replace that with other, words to refer to the land in the Middle East that is so contested and, it’s, really astonishing because not only is the rationale for this change, sort of unclear, but what are official government materials also becomes. really vague. So would that include like something being created for a classroom, a college classroom, a school library, et cetera? It’s not clear. But also there’s a desire not to clarify it when it could be clear so that it will have the necessary chilling and censoring effect.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and teachers are seeing this over and over as you were saying, like. They’re like, well, I don’t know if I can say this. And that’s the idea, is to get everyone to live in fear of non-compliance. Ultimately. I think that’s what we’re talking about here.

Living in fear of non-compliance

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, and this, is like, it’s exactly the same phenomenon that’s now afflicting universities and college teaching that I saw years ago with school libraries. I remember, a vague rule in Missouri, it was a few years ago, that led some school librarians to sweep through their districts and pull any book off the shelf. That might that might run afoul of one of those rules. And I’m actually remembering I have some of these books behind me still from the, I’m just gonna grab ‘em for a sec here. Just coincidentally, I know these are on that shelf. Like they, they pulled, this is a this is a graphic adaptation of the [00:14:00] Gettysburg Address, and you can flip through this book.

I have you tell me what it was in this book that somebody objected to. I’m not sure. The closest that I’ve seen is that the law. Band nudity and there’s like pictures of, slaves here who are, dressed for African weather rather than whatever it is, the middle passage, et cetera.

So, I guess those are people who are not wearing shirts. Okay. If you are told though, that as a librarian you might go to jail and get a criminal record. If you give a certain kind of material to a student and that material might be designated as any kind of nudity and this Gettysburg Address graphic novel, like a book literally written to make this accessible to young people, and you’re saying you might go to jail for it, you’re gonna take that risk. And so Well, apparently not. And so what happens is, people are made to feel like the stakes of this are so high that they ought to air on the side of. Removing materials. And in fact, that phrase err on the side of caution in quotes there, that’s actually a phrase that was popularized in Florida as a way to ban books that school districts should err on the side of caution.

And if you, if we all err on the side of caution when we’re talking about intellectual access to books, I mean, do you know how many books are not cautious when you think about like, books that you actually wanna read? They, you have exciting things that happen in them, unexpected things, topics that you may not encounter in your life, and that you can only come to understand through the, through an impactful story that, that, makes that kind of information or experience accessible to you.

So inevitably. That leads to limiting, the bounds of what people might learn about in a library. And the other book I had here, I pulled off the shelf was, this is a graphic novel adaptation of The Odyssey. That was another one in MIS in Missouri too. And there was a whole bunch of others as well.

[00:16:00] Something like 50 50 or so. Art history books, books like, the works of Picasso. Again. It gets pretty limitless if you are taking that kind of cautious approach. And so now we’re also seeing that in higher education with Texas University professors being told they can’t put things on their syllabus.

one of them most, in the news recently was told that he couldn’t teach. Plato works by Plato and you think, oh, how could you be telling

a university? How could you tell a Philosophy professor not to teach Plato? I still, it’s a philosophical question I don’t have the answer to yet, except to say that’s what it’s like to live under these laws.

that’s the that’s the fundamental contradictions of ‘em actually to what we think of when we think of public education and what it’s supposed to do for people. Critical thinking, open minds.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and, that is another kind of weapon, weaponization of the vagueness is, trying to classify everything as pornography and pornographic. And so that’s obviously what the Gettysburg address challenge presumably was. But they also even did it with Anne Frank. And illustrated, Anne Frank diary

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, that that’s another one that’s been attacked. And one of the supposedly controversial parts of that book involves Anne imagining herself among a field of Greek nude statues of sort of Greek goddesses. And, the artists and the illustrator who talk about that, say, they were trying to honor actually. What Anne was interested in and what she was talking about in that passage from her diary, and the idea that would be somehow pornographic or driven by an illicit intention. I mean, that’s offensive, so unfortunately that’s just what we’ve seen all over.

Supposed advocates for ‘Western values’ are now censoring classic authors

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and, there’s a huge. Terrible irony also in that while these censorship advocates are, trying to censor [00:18:00] these major historical figures and, books, they’re also at the same time claiming to be, we’re the defenders of western culture from these, evil. woke pornographers or whatever they’re, fill in the blank insult.

But they’re, literally attacking the foundations of the very things that they claim to believe it.

FRIEDMAN: I mean, ironically the irony of ironies here, right? and we’ve seen also many universities now start to set up these civic centers on campuses, but they aren’t what they seem, And there are all these norms around. How universities are supposed to work. Like, sometimes we can blur the distinction.

We talk about public education at large in K to 12 versus in higher education, but certainly we understand that like college level education is supposed to be about, the unfettered exploration of ideas

in its truest sense. They’re adults. And so, what’s, been. But there’s also a tradition surrounding how faculty as experts play a role in setting curriculum in determining syllabi and the like.

And what’s happening on a lot of campuses is now this new tactic of. Mandating through public funding, the creation of a civic center for maybe the study of like Western traditional culture or something like that. But then not actually trusting experts in these fields to run these centers. Instead mandating, in some cases through law what students would have to read and how they would have to encounter the topics. And again, like it’s not to say that this is all necessarily. Bad or would not achieve some positive outcomes. But fundamentally, the principle of political control in that direct manner of, excuse me, of college education, the, it’s fundamentally college education was meant to be insulated from that kind of direct political control.

And that’s something that university [00:20:00] leaders certainly in the United States have embraced as part of what has made the American academic system. So strong in the envy of the world is the academic freedom that has led to discoveries, to provocative teaching, to taking up difficult issues. Now, I’m not saying this already wasn’t challenged by other cultural forces.

For a decade it was, but now what we’re seeing is something different. We’re seeing the weaponization of that through direct government censorship, which, unfortunately is just gonna make it even harder to ever right the ship when it comes to these issues.

SHEFFIELD: It does, and, they really are not considering how they would feel if they’re if they’re, the, opposing political party was in charge of these civic centers, because guess what, then according to their, definition of what’s true and what’s right, then. They would say, well, we’re gonna tear out all this curriculum that you guys put in and we’re gonna put in curriculum that supports our party.

And

They wouldn’t like that.

FRIEDMAN: You can imagine the sort of perpetual cycle we might get into where every four years we just, swap everything that’s taught in public schools, one curriculum for the other. And so, yeah, I don’t think, like, I don’t think the answer is either political party or either partisan ideologues dictating the bounds of what we’re able to know, and we’ve seen. We look, we’ve seen efforts to do that in of all kinds across the political spectrum. The issue we’re seeing right now in particular is a kind of weaponization of that government control at a level and sort of scale we’ve really never seen in the United States before. And like people will make comparisons when I talk to ‘em about, the censorship of schools today and universities and how it compares to oh, book bands in the 1970s and eighties, or McCarthyism or, the Comstock era, which is, even earlier or bans on teaching evolution in the 1920s, which led to the famous Scopes Monkey trial.

And the reality is that [00:22:00] actually the combined efforts today in 2026 that include individual universities, individual school districts, municipal bodies, governing boards, state legislators, and now the federal government all working more or less in one way or another to exert this kind of political and ideological control over our public educational institutions.

That is actually all of those other moments in one way or another, combined. It is actually unprecedented and it is at a scale. That this country has never reckoned with. I mean, this is different, And I don’t think, I don’t think people appreciate enough, for example, that some of the federal governments, and directives in the past year, particularly concerning things like patriotic education, quote unquote, or remaking the Smithsonian or insisting that any public funding for libraries or monuments or other public cultural and arts installations needs to support a patriotic notion of the United States.

And it has a set of, very particular definition. I don’t think people understand that actually has its closest parallel in laws that have been passed in Russia and in China. That’s where that comes from. That’s the language. It’s almost verbatim. So that’s the kind of thing that United States has actually historically been against.

Now, that isn’t to say that there couldn’t be different priorities, when we think about federal investment in, in the arts and the culture and the history and, memorials and things like that. But there has been a kind of understanding that there should be. Openness to diversity of views rather than rigid restrictions on how people are allowed to think about this and how they’re supposed to allowed to represent it.

Does censorship actually work though?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, there’s this, i, this extreme naivete also, I think in that, especially in regard to school libraries or public libraries that, they, have this idea of what if we remove [00:24:00] these books from the libraries? Then the students will not know about these things.

And it’s like, well, guess what? teenagers are going to be looking up stuff about sex. Guess what? Teenagers are going to be looking up about, gender identity. Teenagers are going to, want to read about atheism or, whatever. We know, whatever topic you can imagine as an adult.

Teenagers are going to be interested in it because they’re a lot smarter than a lot of adults realize. I think.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I, I think there, there is this question, I’m often asked, well, doesn’t the book banning just. Drive people towards it or make it more attractive in a way. And I do think on some level, the bands are not totally effective for a time. When we think about the scale of this, we’re not just talking about like one taboo book.

We’re talking about like whole libraries being utterly censored. So now that’s a lot of material that some teenagers may not have any. Means to access whatsoever. if you are talking about, people who still have access to Amazon and other opportunities to access books, sure there they have other means, but that’s by no means universal.

In fact, the very purpose of the public library is to ensure that there is a kind of universal access to those materials.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there is, that’s ultimately who these laws really do end up hurting the most is people who can’t afford to buy a book on Amazon or tea or, kids who don’t have access to somebody who they can talk to and trust about their sexuality or whatever. Like that’s who is being is being harmed by these, repressions ultimately.

And and I would say that. I mean, if they feel their ideas are true, then argue for them. Put them, show why they’re right, [00:26:00] instead of trying to censor the other ideas you don’t like. I mean, ultimately that’s, and that works for anybody, I would say.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I often say, when people want to shut something down, that it would be much more powerful to speak out against it. It’d be much more powerful to debate it, to debunk its ideas, to make a persuasive argument about why those ideas are wrong. snuffing out, an opponent or a different ideology when you use, the power of the state or other sort of, mechanisms. in the long run you’re not testing your arguments, you’re not gonna build up the ability to. I think make a compelling case. And so, yeah, I think it’s always just much more important to encourage people to lean in and engage. And maybe that’s uncomfortable. Maybe disagreement is uncomfortable, but we have to remember that censorship is always gonna be worse and it always spreads.

one said, one group censoring another, it’s gonna red down, and it’s just sort of a ping pong of censorship. And then, what are you left with? Nothing.

Fake free speech absolutism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and we even saw this during the COVID Pandemic where people were calling for, harmful ideas to be removed from the internet. And look, those ideas were bad and they were incorrect, but. And they shouldn’t have, and, the companies shouldn’t have promoted them which is really what they were ended were doing ultimately.

But, trying to get them blocked and banned, like that’s, unless people are committing fraud or, committing a, some sort of illegal act. The government really can’t be involved in the, in things like that. Whereas, of course, if private actors want to do something, say, well, that’s not allowed on my platform.

That’s up to them. But like, the government has no place in this regard.

FRIEDMAN: one of the, [00:28:00] surprising ironies, I would say of the past year under the Trump administration in particular touches on that very question of public and private with regard to private universities where, certainly the First Amendment is something that protects speech at public universities, but it’s been all these private universities who have been put under tremendous pressure concerning their federal research funding and other sort of threats of, department of Justice investigations and, threats of losing that funding, et cetera. And, it’s been, again, time and again the private universities who are being brought to heal in one way or another, and targeted. And so interestingly, they have actually greater freedom to resist in some sense. Government dictates because they’re not public institutions, they don’t have to be neutral to, with regard to speech.

But nonetheless, we’re seeing that, they’re the ones that the administration has been targeting. Less so with private schools. Only occasionally have I seen. Proposals for state laws that would seek to restrict teaching in public schools compared to, sorry, excuse me. In, private schools at the K to 12 level.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, to be fair, I mean, some of the private universities have definitely stood up for their rights at Harvard University being, one of the biggest ones. And, but yeah, Columbia University definitely has not. And you, the thing that they haven’t realized, the ones who have knuckled under is that.

Giving these concessions against your, free speech. That isn’t, it just invites more attacks on your freedom. It doesn’t protect you in any way.

FRIEDMAN: Well, no, and you’re, I mean, it goes around, comes around karma. We can think about it different ways, but also, today’s book Bans are going to create and teach a generation that what they should do with ideas they don’t like is censor them. They were already getting [00:30:00] that idea. That idea was already spreading. Now it’s getting worse. Maybe you could even say that elements on the right took that from elements on the left, you know that ideas can be harmful and therefore speakers can be harmful, and therefore books can be harmful, et cetera. I mean, to a certain extent, sure, you can read a book and it can affect you, but I always hesitate to suggest that these things are so harmful that the answer ought to be, erasure, banning, prohibitions, et cetera.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the, and, it’s gotten worse in the sense that so after, trying to say, well, the social media companies were mean to us with regard to our misinformation on vaccines or whatever. Now the administration is also trying to say, well, and and they had some lawsuits about it, which they, lost thankfully.

Trying to say that. Well, the social media companies are public utilities, and so therefore they should not be allowed to have any free speech rights.

They’re of their own to prohibit content which is, that’s ultimately. that’s, another way of doing censorship by saying, it’s like saying if you have a a club, you know that you’ve set up with your friends.

And you have no right to, disinvite people if it’s open to the public and, that’s just not, that’s not right. And, it’s, just a perversion of this. It’s like they’ve created a fake free speech absolutism, I think. And you see that a lot.

FRIEDMAN: You, you do. And maybe it’s not fake, but it’s also very inconsistent. So in the wake of, Charlie Kirk, being murdered. A university campus, that’s an opportunity for a real conversation about violence and ideological disagreement in this country getting out of control. And, to a certain extent, you saw a lot of praise for Kirk from across the political spectrum for his willingness to at least try and debate people.

Now, people would say he was never really, I don’t know whether he was authentic, whether he was really debating, I’m, not even [00:32:00] gonna get into that. I’m just gonna say that in the wake of it, you saw all these politicians who started to try to crack down on. Things that professors, teachers and other people in all kinds of professions were saying, in tweets on Facebook, sometimes I was putting, maybe their Facebook settings were private, but somebody screenshotted it.

And there were groups who were collating this information and trying to get basically as many people fired for speaking their minds as possible. Now, in another moment, that would’ve been the precise kind of thing that many of the politicians who were involved in amplifying this. Their party was known and basically making a name of themselves as being the ones who, believe in free speech and don’t wanna be snowflakes and, wanna make sure that, freedom of speech is our most, most cherished liberty. And yet, here was this effort to punish people for things that they thought and said as opposed to saying, look, this was a heightened emotional moment in the country. And look, I think it’s hard. It’s just hard for someone to remember that actually if people are engaging and leaning in and disagreeing fiercely, that’s actually a robust democratic public square. It’s hard to get excited about that anymore. I know. But yet that’s actually, it’s meant to be raucous. That’s how change happens. Jostling forces speaking passionately, who would want, like. Inevitably, the more we, wiggle away those freedoms and kind of soften everyone’s speech, we’re losing something really important. And I, I, think about those impacts not just about on like democracy or political argument, but like those impacts on art, on culture, on feeling, on emotion, on storytelling. And I don’t wanna lose that.

Responding to the ‘parents rights’ canard

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so let’s, so I, think a lot of people who were watching or listening are, they have a, to this show, they have a, commitment to free speech and, sending up for. People’s ability to, write [00:34:00] and to say what they think. So, but I, wanna if just kind of go through some of the arguments that they might hear if they are trying to stand up in, for their local library or stand up in the school district.

So, let’s just maybe go through a couple of these arguments. So I guess one of the, probably the biggest one that, that we often hear is, well, you’re saying parents don’t have any rights. About how their children are educated. Is that what you’re saying?

FRIEDMAN: Well, no.

I think that’s, absolutely a caricature. There is a notion that has been pedaled that like. Parents must, I don’t know, have full and total control over their children and what they can learn in schools. Or any, anything less, like parents are losing their quote unquote rights. I, resist any notion that says that one person has rights that, include control of somebody else.

like there’s autonomy of the individual. And it’s not to say that parents don’t have an important role in like steering the upbringing of their children being involved in schools of contributing to how a group of young people in a community learn. But this notion around parents’ rights, it just takes us down this. very difficult road where like more and more, I guess the idea is that the students and the young person has like less and less rights and no rights at all. what about the rights of the individual to learn and to explore and to, figure out who they wanna be in the world.

All of those things are also important in any notion of a liberal democracy, and at the same time. We do have to recognize that there is something valuable about what we call like a public education, a shared public education. when people come to a common understanding and have a common foundation of, information about something in the world, that’s what we think about when we think about like, history is something that, people may not have learned together yet.

They, [00:36:00] share. Similarly when you think about it with like regard to different identities, there has to be some baseline understanding of, that people of different identities. Ought to be free to express them and ought to be free to, be represented in schools and other venues. And so, I, just fear that sometimes this notion of parents’ rights is being taken to such an extreme where there’s almost like nothing left of the notion of. The public rights, the civic rights of everyone to learn together, to, meet people who are different and look like. I don’t think things in K 12 or higher education are perfect with regard to like the freedom to learn by any means. But at the same time, there is something valuable in having curriculum set by experts that everybody gets to learn. And I’ll say just, I’ve seen this parent’s rights rhetoric. Also be extended to meaning that a parent should essentially get like a list of, every topic that ever might come up in schools and almost be able to tick off, that which they, don’t want their kid learning like, Timmy and CA doesn’t wanna learn about slavery, but Billy and CB doesn’t wanna learn about the Holocaust or in CC, they don’t wanna learn about L-G-B-T-Q people and in cd Well, they don’t wanna learn anything about, I don’t know communism. Well, how is the teacher possibly supposed to like, answer a kid’s question that touches on a, f kid asks a question of a general nature and the teacher’s not allowed to answer it. Not allowed to provide a book direct someone to the dictionary or an encyclopedia. I mean, it just becomes completely unworkable.

And so it sows the seeds for the unworkability of public education as a concept when we open the door this wide. And again, for a long time. Individual parents have had ways to engage where, let’s say there’s like a common read in a classroom of a group of students and a parent really doesn’t want their [00:38:00] kid, they meet with the teacher, they come up with an alternative.

Maybe it’s not the best solution from a freedom to learn perspective, but it protects the, freedom and the opportunity for everyone else in the class to learn. Without that being interrupted. But right now all the solutions that are being put out are essentially since Censorious ones for everybody.

It’s like, well, some parents don’t like that book, so now that book can’t be in the classroom. some parents didn’t like that lesson, so now that lesson can’t be in the curriculum. That kind of thing.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and it’s, I mean, yeah, taken to the extreme, this is basically saying some parents have more rights than others, is essentially what they’re trying to do. That this, because it is always a tiny handful of people. And, in many cases these are not even parents of students in the district who are challenging materials.

And they’re basically saying, well, if I don’t like a book, then, if one person out of a hundred doesn’t like a book. Then the 99 can never be exposed to it and that’s a violation of those parents’ rights.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, and, apparently. I mean, apparently everybody else’s parents’ rights, so to speak, don’t matter anymore. And my colleagues a group I work with in Florida, the Florida Freedom to Read project has make been making this point. In that state we’ve seen all sorts of books removed from schools, and they have made the case that the removal of the books might, serve some parents’ interests, but it’s against theirs.

Well, how do you resolve that? I mean, if you have a community where 49% want a book and 51% don’t. Does that mean those 49% shouldn’t get it? Now let’s flip it. Let’s say 1% don’t and 99% do, or something like that. Well, does that mean that 99% should, get it? What about that one? How do you honor that?

I mean, there’s always a balance to these. It’s, not easy to come up with solutions that are going to appease everyone, but I just want to sort of urge everyone to step back from the intense edge of this and recognize that. In the United [00:40:00] States today, most of us are gonna learn about things. Most young people are going to have moments where they, see a television show or read a book or read a newspaper, and this is a good thing to be sort of curious about the world and have opportunities to pursue that curiosity and all these efforts to try and control that and cabinet it in.

Not only do I think that in the long term they’re going to backfire, but I think they’re really damaging. For what we might think of as like the study habits, the culture of freedom that we want to instill in young people, that’s what’s at jeopardy here.

America’s declining global reputation under Trump

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, we’re seeing that with regard to the United States’, standing in the world in surveys now, that there was one that I just saw recently that showed that

the US had kind of moved from the middle of the pack in terms of, reputation from 30 down to the very lowest tier in just one year.

and this, chilling effect, it, really does make people who are going to be the future, bestselling novelists, bestselling, children’s book authors or scientists or, whatever the future leaders of the world who might have wanted to come here. Now are not going to want to come here.

And, ones who were born here, a lot of them might feel like, well, I don’t feel welcome here anymore because I’m trans or, and so, I’m gonna go move to this other country and invent a way to, cure cancer or whatever. Like that’s really what we’re talking about. when we are cutting off the, marketplace of ideas.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, and, we see that kind of anti the anti internationalist. Trend is also, something that’s been impacting higher education and is bound to trickle down to K to 12 as well, which is this idea that the country should in fact, make it much harder for foreign scholars to come to the United States for students to study at universities.

And there’s been all sorts of ways in which, the federal administration [00:42:00] in the past year has tried to do this. Complicating visa processes undermining research by, many international scholars. Even things like the destruction of U-S-A-I-D. They used to fund research in this sort of partnership manner where the federal money went to American universities to do projects with partners in other countries doing research into things like agricultural and, global, global health. And all of that has been decimated in the past year. All of the good standing of the United States and the world and all frankly, like the progress on a lot of research projects a lot of which, run on a timeline. So let’s say you had a, cancer trial or something like that, or something else that you were planning over multiple years.

Well, what happens if you’re in year three of five of expected funding and all of a sudden the government changes the rules and violates the contracts? Where they were gonna give you more funding. I mean, it is just disrupted a tremendous amount of activity, intellectual activity, teaching, training research, just that search for knowledge.

And so it’s had this massive effect and there is this kind of, America first, let’s call it mentality that, just seems totally it seems interested and totally disregarding the fact that like a lot of American culture. Thrives on its exchange around the world. When a, German, symphony comes to the United States, or a play produced in Namibia, and you can see it in New York City, whatever it is, this is what makes the United States enriched and ha, it’s the diversity of that culture enriches the country. And it’s being, yeah, it’s being just significantly decimated this year.

Responding to false ‘patriotism’ arguments

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I wanna circle back to one of the other arguments that we hear also sometimes from censorship proponents, which is in, the educational realm that, they say they want to, that they’re trying to have patriotic education and that, having, and so removing authors that criticize historic figures, particularly some [00:44:00] of the founders of America or whatever, that, they’re saying that authors that tr cite true facts about.

Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or whatever, that they are anti-American by, and that they want students to hate America and hate themselves. Like that’s a thing I often hear. What do you what would you respond to that?

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, I mean, I think it sort of gets back to that question from earlier about how we reckon with truth. and if a truth is uncomfortable, does that mean we shouldn’t teach it? Or it’s important to teach, to move forward? I think there is an entire history of this country, which has been suppressed for a long time, and efforts like, whether you agree with every aspect of it or not, there have been these efforts to. Confront that things like the efforts in Tulsa related to the race massacre from the 1920s, are an effort to tell that story. And again, it may make people feel differently about the country, but it doesn’t have to. You could, you can be just as, you can be just as upset about the censorship of these stories or just as proud of. The reckoning with them and learning about them, it’s not a given that, stories about the past are gonna make you feel a certain kind of way. And I certainly, don’t think that’s a reason to well lie to kids or hide, the complexities of, information that they might encounter.

So, I think a lot of that also just seems to tread on. I don’t know assumptions about how people are going to feel when they learn things that are not actually reflective of how young people may actually feel, but how, I don’t know, adults feel about it. And again, like how I feel about history doesn’t mean. Something did or didn’t happen, it, the idea that would be the metric for how we conduct research or how we teach people about the world and how it came to be, what it is, it just doesn’t seem, it doesn’t make sense to me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it doesn’t and, there’s no right. [00:46:00] Not to be offended. I mean, like that’s the other kind of terrible ironies of this current moment is that, as you were saying earlier, that they had spent decades railing against snowflakes and political correctness and, all these things that they said were bad.

and, there were, in fact some over reaches in that regard. And some people that were that their speech was wrongfully terminated. But. This idea that you don’t, you have the right to not be offended at hearing somebody saying their own personal experience. Like you don’t have that right?

They have the, right to say what they want, and if you don’t like it, then you know, don’t watch it.

FRIEDMAN: I mean, it is always like this, notion that if you don’t like a book, you should never have been, I don’t know, started reading it at all. Like how do you learn, I mean, puzzle this one for me. How do you learn to I. How do you learn to dislike something? How do you learn like your own taste in a book or a movie or a TV show? It’s ‘cause you start, engaging with it and then you don’t like it and you turn it off. So like, that’s not a reason to suppress, your opportunity to have encountered a thing that you didn’t like. And in fact, many popular things. There’s someone who doesn’t like, for everyone who like loves, I don’t know, show popular right now, heated rivalry, there’s someone who will tell you, yeah, well, it’s not really that great a show. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t wanna finish it, whatever it is. So, I always say like, okay, you don’t like the books, close the books. You don’t like the books. Don’t take the books outta the library. But don’t stop the library from stalking the books for other people who might wanna read them. A lot of books aren’t so great. That’s okay. A lot of books, people differ in, their own taste in what they think is excellent, in what they think is a great book. What they, are moved by when they read. We should be embracing that diversity of experience with regard to reading materials.

[00:48:00] Certainly

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it’s if you don’t like Indian food, you’re, you’re not gonna call for it to be banned, the Indian restaurants to be banned. Nobody does that. and, the, this

FRIEDMAN: not yet.

SHEFFIELD: for your mind?

FRIEDMAN: Yeah. I mean, Not yet.

Well, and I think like that’s important to recognize too, is that, similarly, literally in the way that we might embrace like the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of food, the marketplace of books. The, point of a library is to serve a diverse community, in particular the point of a even a university, with its wide range of courses, yes, certainly there’s, required courses and electives and all that. But on the whole, it has evolved to serve a wide range of professions, a wide range of fields, and just the way in which that’s being constrained and narrowed by political agendas is very concert.

The value of literacy and reading

SHEFFIELD: It is. Well, and now aside from some of the censorship though, issues that, which you guys do a great job at one of the other things that. Penn America also is very good on, is trying to teach people about just the general value of literacy and of reading. Because I think that’s, under, its own threat in and of its, independently of people trying to censor it.

Is that, just this idea that, well I should, I should only watch little YouTube shorts or Instagram stories or, whatever. And like, that’s. That’s a serious issue. the decline of literacy. And I’ve heard a lot of teachers and professors who have been in that business for a long time, and they, say that the students are, not reading as much and they’re, not able to pay attention as much.

And that’s a, that’s really bad thing.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah, you would think, that’s a thing that people could, agree on and get behind and say, yeah, literacy and the freedom to read is a good thing. And, it’s known that if students are, motivated to be interested. In [00:50:00] their own reading material, then they’re gonna be more likely to read it.

If you have this is one of the key things with like graphic novels is understanding that for librarians, why do they have graphic novels in a high school library? It’s ‘cause a lot of ninth graders are actually still reluctant readers. a lot of them haven’t developed the skills to read a long book, and they are interested in reading graphic novels that speak to them. And there’s also this idea that comes from like a stereotype about comics, which has been carried over, which is the idea that reading a book, you know. A paragraph of text page after page is better than something with pictures. The pictures are juvenile in some way, but I can tell you reading contemporary graphic novels. A lot of times what you are decoding on a page is actually much more complicated. There, there are ways in which information storytelling can happen in a graphic novel that can’t happen when all you have is sentences on a page. It’s just, it’s a very different experience. I’m not trying to say that one is absolutely better than the other, but there’re different.

And why should we be trying to ban something that a group of artists and writers have gotten really skilled at. A group of publishers are putting their, creative energy out in the world with, and a group of writers and audiences are interested, sorry, a group of readers and audiences are interested in accessing that.

Like, why would we interrupt in that, circuit, so sort of some moral standards about how we ought to control the circulation of a thing that through that sort of free market Okay. Of creativity and what people are interested in. It is working fine. And so again, you see that kind of effort to clog it up, to intervene, to exert control of a political and ideological nature.

And we could see the same thing about, education, the freedoms learned, access to graphic novels, what the Smithsonian got out there on a, in plaques and other things. And, in each case, it’s an opportunity for us as citizens to [00:52:00] recognize. What we’re at risk of losing and what we can stand, against in, in, in standing against censorship.

SHEFFIELD: And ultimately, standing against government censorship and control. I think that is the ultimate pro-American act. I mean, and let’s be clear about that.

FRIEDMAN: Certainly that is one of the things that animated, motivated, the original revolutionaries who were rebelling against that. Absolutely. And and that notion, that spirit, let’s call it, of critical thinking, that has been a key part of what people around the world think makes American education. We’re talking about public schools or universities, good and unique and what we’re known for. Why do we sacrifice that and, try and ruin it?

SHEFFIELD: Exactly. All right. Yeah, so this has been a great conversation, John. So for people that want to keep up with your stuff and you guys have any recent reports you wanna plug or something like that?

FRIEDMAN: Sure, yeah. This month in January, we released a few weeks ago a new report called America’s Censored Campuses 2025. It the subtitle is Expanding the Web of Control, and it’s a comprehensive report on the 2025. Censorship of universities. We look at the growth of state laws and where that’s at in terms of controlling academic curriculum and other measures in universities.

And we look at the rise of efforts to control universities from the federal government, which have, reached, as I said earlier, unprecedented levels. And you can find that at pen.org.

SHEFFIELD: Alright. Sounds good. Good to have you back.

FRIEDMAN: Great. Thanks for the conversation. Take care.

SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your [00:54:00] support.

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