The long list

 Bill O'Reilly is not pleased to find himself in distinguished company.  The author of Killing Kennedy, Killing the Witches and about a dozen other books about killing is on the Escambia County list of censored books along with The Diary of Anne Frank, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Wuthering Heights and several encyclopedias and dictionaries, and he's furious.  "Preposterous!" he growled to Newsweek on learning that Killing Jesus and Killing Reagan have been challenged under Florida's HB 1069.  "We'll find out exactly who made the decisions and put their pictures on television..." along with their addresses, presumably.  He had no problem with the law when it was used to punish "far-left progressive people trying to impose an agenda on children," but now it clearly needs to be tightened up to make it clear that only lefty books are unacceptable.  Like And Tango Makes Three, the true story of the male penguins in the Central Park Zoo who raised a chick.


Funny thing about censorship -- once you start, it's hard to stop.  As Tom Lehrer noted, "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd."

Unless you know your case will reach the Flying Alitos, it's not a good idea to try to stifle the press either.  Trump sued The New York Times and his niece Mary Trump for publishing a work of fiction called The Tax Returns of Donald J. Trump, but the case was thrown out and now he's on the hook for $392,638 in legal fees.  

They do things better in Russia, where the books of popular novelist Boris Akunin are no longer available because of his opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.  Akunin, the pen name of Georgian-born Grigori Chkhartishvili who mainly writes Tsarist-era detective stories, has been designated a "foreign agent."  Fortunately, he lives in the UK, beyond the reach of Russian literary critics.  And the separation of church and state does not exist:  archpriest Alexei Uminsky has been kicked out of the priesthood for refusing to recite the compulsory "Prayer for Holy Rus."  He's not the first, but he is a thirty-year man who led the funeral service for Mikhail Gorbachev.

Free speech also ain't free in our great democratic ally Israel.  History teacher Meir Baruchin has been held in solitary confinement in Jerusalem's "Russian Compound" prison since November because he made a series of Facebook posts criticizing the military and mourning the residents of Gaza.  An editorial in Haaretz called him "a political tool to send a political message."  

In other First Amendment news, Fox News is not airing Mike Lindell's commercials.  He says they're trying to silence him.  They say he owes them $7.8 million.  Both sides could be right.

And in London, thousands of people marched through Westminster to protest the continuing attacks on Gaza, while the police made random arrests for such crimes as "pushing the limit" on placards and slogans and "possession of stickers to be used for criminal damage."  That's a lot of power to put in the hands of people who write traffic tickets and investigate bicycle thefts.  








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