A school district in Northwest Florida has drawn the national media spotlight after it was revealed that they’ve banned dictionaries and encyclopedias in order to comply with governor Ron DeSantis’ book bans. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A school district in northwest Florida has drawn the national media spotlight after it revealed that they were banning dictionaries and encyclopedias in order to comply with Governor DeSantis’ book bans. Unfortunately, this is our, it’s happening in our county.
Farron Cousins: It’s our backyard.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. And I’m looking at this thing and first thing, I was looking, did they ban Grapes of Wrath because there’s some sexual content? Or did they, you know, To Kill A Mockingbird, you go through all these and you can nitpick and find just about anything. Go ahead and pick the story up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is, again, it’s so horrible because it is literally in our backyard right here. But we’ve got the Escambia County School District that has banned 2,800 books as part of DeSantis signed HB 1069, which says any book that has any kind of sexual content, mentions of sex, can’t do it.
Mike Papantonio: It’s not gonna stand.
Farron Cousins: Absolutely can’t have it.
Mike Papantonio: You agree, it’s not gonna stand?
Farron Cousins: Oh, right.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, as a matter of fact, the judge, I don’t know what they’re gonna rule, but we had some of our attorneys there listening to the argument, and it’s just so unconstitutional. It’s vague. You can’t even figure out what it is that you’re trying to accomplish here. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And that is, of course, one of the biggest issues with this. It’s you’ve written it in a way that gives you the ability to ban anything. Which is why this district has pulled several versions of dictionaries off the shelves because they have a definition of the word sex. They’re pulling encyclopedias off the shelf. Guinness Book of World Records comes off the shelves in this county right now, because, uh oh, it may have mentions of any kind of sexual activity or perhaps this person is of a different sexuality and they’re being, I don’t know that it’s really the fault of the school district.
Mike Papantonio: It’s not, it’s not.
Farron Cousins: Because they have the liability if a parent complains.
Mike Papantonio: It’s not the school district.
Farron Cousins: So they overreact and just say, everything’s gone. No books.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. You know what I thought about as I was reading this story, is I’ve thought about the number of times you and I have stood here, and we’ve talked about censorship in general. So this has got two sides to it. Okay. Here you got a bunch of right wingers, we don’t want the word sex, but you also have the other side of it where speakers show up at a college campus and they’re gonna say something that some segment of the campus disagrees with. So they censor the speaker. They say you can’t show up, or the comedian standing up on the stage and he’s just doing a show. But they say, oh, we don’t like what he’s saying. So we’re going to, we’re gonna boycott him. We’re gonna make his life miserable. It’s same kind of censorship. I mean, it’s exactly the same thing. It’s just the other side of it. But I don’t see, or websites. Somebody puts up on a website something. We do it all the time. Hell, on this show, I insult plenty of people. And rather than analyzing what I’m saying, the easiest thing is to do is attack. Censor it. But that’ll never happen with us because we’re in a unique situation. We don’t need advertisers. We don’t need subscribe. We’re independent. But what about the folks that feel that kind of censorship pressure? This is kind of the other side of that. I think.
Farron Cousins: Well, I will, just to address the point, if students wanna call for a boycott because they disagree with the speaker, I’m okay with that. Call for the boycott if you want to do that. It’s when there is some kind of rule that comes down saying, okay, we can’t have people that will say this or say that. That’s when it goes into full blown censorship. So that obviously is a problem. With what’s happening in this district right now, again, they’ve cast such a broad net so that they don’t get in trouble. Even conservative books. There’s books by Bill O’Reilly that have now been pulled off the shelves.
Mike Papantonio: Anne Frank’s, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, censored.
Farron Cousins: Right. It’s laughable. And these are books that we all read growing, I mean, the school told us, you have to read this book.
Mike Papantonio: Guinness Book of World Records, censored. Biographies of Lady Gaga, censored. Thurgood Marshall, you know, one of the best jurist in history, censored. But you see, it’s both sides. It’s not just one. You can’t look at this story and not say, this is the danger of censorship. Because even though they may not have a policy at a university when a speaker goes and they don’t like what the speaker says, well, you don’t have to have a policy to say it’s censorship. It’s defacto censorship because they make that speaker go home or they don’t allow ’em to speak. So that’s the danger. I mean, to me it’s a such a slippery slope. This, first of all, this is unconstitutional. There’s no way this is gonna stand. I have zero doubt that this is gonna be held unconstitutional. So, it’s not really a problem. I think the real, to me, the real problem is, is when we have a culture that is so unable to listen to something that they disagree with, where they have to move into a safe space. They have to move in a safe space because they can’t, uh, I don’t wanna hear that. That’s dangerous as hell to me. That is dangerous as hell.
Farron Cousins: Well, to me it’s, listen, if you don’t want to hear something, you don’t wanna watch something, you don’t watch it. You don’t hear it. If you don’t wanna read these books, don’t read the books. I don’t understand why people don’t understand that they can just not do it.
Mike Papantonio: How do you explain, first of all, I don’t know whether agree with me or not, you know, you and I agree or disagree on a lot of stuff. Do you see at least the point I’m trying to make here? That it’s a two-edged sword. It holds true for both sides. And these right wingers are just as loony as the snowflakes that show up and say, I don’t want this comedian to show up because he’s insulted whatever. I don’t like what he has to say, so I’m going to make their life miserable. You see, it’s the same kind of censorship. Only it’s a defacto censorship.
Farron Cousins: Well, look, only one side’s trying to make it illegal and that’s coming from the right. So we see DeSantis has done this, other states have picked up on this, Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansa is working on it as well. And so, yeah. There’s a lot of people on the left, especially with the comedian issue. They’re like, listen, we get that you have your own sense of comedy. We don’t like it and we don’t want you here.
Mike Papantonio: Then don’t go.
Farron Cousins: But at the same time, I bring up this thing from George Carlin, comedy’s never supposed to punch down. You gotta be attacking the ones in power. Don’t attack the marginalized people. So that’s, I like that old statement from George Carlin. And I think it holds true. It’s easy to mock a small community because you know everybody is not a part of it. But when you take on the powers that be, that’s when you make a difference.
Mike Papantonio: Do you think Chappelle ought to be able to go on stage and part of his routine is to talk about trans or gays, that he’s able to do that? Or should we say you may not do that?
Farron Cousins: He’s able to do that. Absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: And people go.
Farron Cousins: And people go.
Mike Papantonio: And some people choose not to go. And that works.
Farron Cousins:Yes.
Mike Papantonio: That’s not censorship. Okay.
