Nineteen Minutes

... to come talk about banned books.

Specifically, we're gonna roll it back to "Nineteen Minutes" because I feel like it is so on point right now.

That book has been banned 28 times, more than that, and then 100 others in the-

Yeah

The book bans in America began ramping out of control after 2020.

They were mostly motivated by Moms for Liberty, which gave up their assault on masks and isolation during COVID [laughs] to suddenly decide that all these parental consent laws, which were very poorly worded in these conservative states, didn't just say, "I don't want my kid to read this book, so I'm gonna make sure that they're not in class that day or take them out to do a different project." They decided instead that they had the right to tell other people's children what not to read.

The interesting thing about "Nineteen Minutes" is that it is not banned because of a school shooting.

It is banned because of a single page, page 313, in which there is a date rape that is really endemic to the anti-bullying message of the, of the book in, in general, and in particular because I used the word erection, which I guess high school students don't know about.