Kirk Cameron’s recently published children’s book, Pride Comes Before the Fall, is a charming story about the dangers inherent in being overly prideful rather than humble.  While some detractors have labeled this book by the former child TV star as “anti-gay” because of its message about pride, Cameron prefers to call it “pro-humility.”

If you live in the state of New Hampshire, however, don’t go to your local public library to get a copy of this book because you won’t find it unless you live in one particular town.*  You’ll have a much easier time finding Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir, which is available at more than half of New Hampshire’s 232 libraries, or Juno Dawson’s “how to” guide, This Book Is Gay, held by fifty-two.

Library users have a better than even chance of finding critical race theory guru Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Antiracist available in any given public library in New Hampshire. But if you want to read Why I Stand, the autobiography of Isaac Washington, the NBA player who refused to kneel when his teammates chose to do so, you’ll have a hard time getting your hands on it; only two libraries in the entire state include it in their collections.

A similar situation is evident when evaluating library holdings related to the controversial issue of climate change. Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, a book by Australian geologist and former University of Melbourne professor Ian Plimer (accused of being a “climate change denier”), is nowhere to be found in New Hampshire’s public library system.  Meanwhile, The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, an obviously ghostwritten treatise, is owned by seventy-three libraries statewide.

These are just a few of the head-shaking facts I found when searching the New Hampshire State Library’s interlibrary loan (ILL) database, the purpose of which is to facilitate the sharing of resources among the state’s public libraries.  While my information is limited to one small purplish state, it reflects a troubling situation that is likely a problem throughout the country: public library collections are favoring woke material over conservative books, and this begs the question, “Who is really banning whom?”

The main definition provided for the verb “ban” on Dictionary.com is “to prohibit, forbid, or bar.”  All these words suggest an action that will prevent something from happening, perhaps even involving a rule or law.  The epithet “book banner” should similarly, therefore, describe someone who will prevent the reading of a particular book or books.  Increasingly nowadays, “book banner” is a term used to describe parents who object to certain books being shelved in the children’s room of their local public library.  Such parents, however, are not actually prohibiting anyone from reading anything.  They just want some books on sensitive subjects regarding sex and gender moved to other areas in the library so that children are not exposed to this material without parental consent.  Most of these parents recognize the right of adults to have access to these titles, including parents who might choose to have their children read them.  The reality is that the term “book banner” is being used as a scare tactic by woke librarians and library organizations to mislead the public into believing that some parents are ushering in a neo-Nazi society that will ultimately lead to the throwing of books into raging bonfires.  Nothing could be further from the truth!

In order for a book to be truly banned, it must be impossible to read; you cannot get it anywhere, not in your local library, not at another library, not at your local bookstore, not even on Amazon.  Such banning requires government suppression such as that which did actually occur during the Nazi era in Germany.  What parents are doing in libraries is not banning books.

The only way to completely avoid what is erroneously being called book banning today is to buy every single book that is currently being published.  That is obviously impossible considering that the average public library, especially in small-town New Hampshire, has limited shelf space with room for only a few tens of thousands of books.  Obtaining most books not held by your local library, however, is actually quite easy thanks to interlibrary loan (ILL).  The existence of ILL should negate the book-banning argument because this service, which allows patrons to get just about any book they might want, is supposed to prevent the prohibition that characterizes a ban.

There’s an insidious problem with the ILL system, however, because it does not allow patrons to get certain books, and those prohibited books are often conservative titles, as reflected by the examples I have offered above.  Conversely, it is very easy to get what many would describe as woke titles.  Analyzing the results of my various ILL database searches suggests a troubling answer to the question, “Who’s banning whom?”

The bottom line is that it is much easier to obtain left-leaning woke material via ILL and much harder to get more conservative titles.  The situation reflected in the ILL database of a purplish state like New Hampshire speaks volumes about the lack of balance between different ideologies—an imbalance that likely exists in other states.  The lack of conservative titles available through ILL is a direct result of the purchasing decisions made by individual public libraries, decisions that inordinately favor woke titles.  It is a situation that is also reflected in new book displays at public libraries, which are far more likely to highlight left-leaning titles than conservatively themed ones.

A few years ago, I requested that my local public library purchase a new book—Michael Knowles, Amazon’s #1 bestseller Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.  This book is about the weaponization of political correctness, and it is written by a well-known conservative writer, so not surprisingly, my request was denied. The library justified this denial by claiming that there were no positive reviews of this book.  While I was easily able to find a lot of positive feedback online about this title, librarians, following the mandates of the American Library Association, only consider reviews in left-leaning publications like Library Journal and The New York Times.

When a book requested by a tax-paying citizen is not selected for a public library collection, this situation could be considered a “book ban” using the same twisted meaning that the woke left is pushing. In an article entitled “Is It ‘Banning’ To Reject the Book in the First Place,” Neal McCloskey asserts:

“…it is just as much ‘banning’ for public institutions to reject books in the first place as to remove them later on. The ultimate result is the same: not making a book available for the public to borrow. Of course, this is not really banning, which would be to prohibit people from reading a book at all—making it illegal to purchase or possess—not refusing to let people borrow it for free. But if people want to misapply the term, they should misapply it equally.”

While the existence of the ILL system, which facilitates rather than prohibits the obtaining of books, should negate the “book banner” argument, at the same time an analysis of selected library holdings reveals that the left is actually “banning” books (using their own distorted definition) rather than the conservatives that they hypocritically criticize.  So let’s get the woke librarians and opponents of true intellectual freedom to stop using the term “book ban” unless it truly applies to the situation.  This emotionally charged term has been misused long enough.  It’s time for logic and common sense to ban the egregious misuse of the pejorative epithet “book banner” and to stop demonizing concerned parents by labeling them with this derogatory term.

This article originally appeared on New Hampshire State Representative Arlene Quaratiello’s Substack newsletter “No Shushing Now: Exposing Today’s Woke Libraries.”  Subscribe for free at arlenequaratiello.substack.com.  

The post Who’s Banning Whom? – The Hypocrisy of Being Called a “Book Banner” appeared first on Granite Grok.

During the Summer of Love (2020), Democrats demanded you support Black Lives Matter. Democrat politicians willingly defunded city police forces in the name of protecting minorities. Inner-city crime (predictably) skyrocketed, so Dem DAs hid that hockey stick (on paper) by not calling a long list of crimes… crime.

But it still looks like crime to the minorities trapped in those neighborhoods. At the same time, the leaders of Black Lives Matter took the billions donated to BLM to protect them and moved to peaceful white suburbs while inner-city blacks watched that crime drive away businesses and jobs.

Democrats, who made all of this possible, aren’t taking any responsibility; in fact, they’ve lined up a new scapegoat.

A recent editorial column in The New York Times, “Kia and Hyundai Helped Enable a Crime Wave. They Should Pay for It,” has been part of a spate of national and local media stories blaming the massive surge in car thefts on the Korean automaker. (Kia is owned by Hyundai.)

A number of blue cities beset by crime and auto thefts have decided to sue the automakers following the success of a class-action lawsuit earlier this year. On the list of cities suing Kia and Hyundai are Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York.

The contention here is that it’s the fault of the South Korean car companies for making some of their vehicles too easy to steal.

Kia and Hyundai (same company) have made moves to improve anti-theft security, but Democrats have set their heart on treating cars like guns. The thing is the problem, not the person, and it is not the Left’s fault for making crime pay. These self-stealing cars are to blame, as is the company that made them, which only tells me that Hyundai isn’t donating enough to Democrats.

I’m sure the Left has other motives, but the root of the problem is those damn Dems. Chicago was a warzone before BLM, with nothing but Democrats to blame. They run the city. They run and set policies for the police department. They fund, defund, or trample on cops, making it harder to get anyone to do that job. And it has been that way for decades.

There is no one else to blame for whatever happens in Chicago but the Democrat party where Black Lives Don’t Matter, not even to black Democrat politicians. Oh, sure, maybe when they get started, but The Windy City Political Machine swallows them up or spits them out.

Hyundai didn’t disarm everyone except those who could afford security and the criminals. They aren’t responsible for going soft on crime. Democrats did that.

Here’s Omni Ceren, writing at X in response to some left-wing babbling nonsense about car thefts in Chicago.

Why would Kia and Hyundai do this? https://t.co/zNqS06vETa pic.twitter.com/YwaLbfqRja

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) September 6, 2023

In related car news, beginning with the Dem party-sponsored riots, carjackings in Chicago went up 134% from 2019 to 2020. Those are cars stolen from people still in them, and that number has not much declined. Since 2020, the average reported annual number of carjackings is 1645, more than double the three-year average before 2020.

Did Hyundai do that too?

Is the carmaker also responsible for the decline in carjacking arrests, which dropped from nearly 10% of the criminals responsible to about 6%?

C’mon, man, explain that away. And not just in Chicago. Every city (or state) run by Democrats will encounter this sort of deflection. Burlington, Vermont, has recently begun its death spiral into the toilet of systemic Democrat rule, and we’ve been following that in real-time.

It’s a disease that starts with (d), with only one treatment. Vote regularly and not for Democrats. But the other thing they can’t seem to escape is the belief that, at some point, all this misery will end, and things will get better. Sorry. Chicago is about as good as that gets, and your future looks much more like those even more dangerous Cities Marc told us about in Mexico.

That is the future of progressivism. San Francisco’s poop and needle map, declining tourism, rising crime, and bigger budgets that make the few fat, safe, and happy and leave everyone else with less, and not just becasue someone stole their Hyundai.

The post Democrats Blame Car Maker for Rise in Auto Thefts to Distract From Their Crappy Record on Crime appeared first on Granite Grok.

In New Hampshire the RINO problem is spelled S-U-N-U-N-U. In Texas it’s spelled B-U-S-H. Here’s Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Impeachment-Lawyer torching the Bushies. If you don’t want to watch the entire video, start at 1:15.

The post Must See … Ken Paxton’s Impeachment Lawyer Says Bush Era In Texas Has Ended And Tells Bushies To Go Back To Maine appeared first on Granite Grok.

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan was asked to investigate whether Donald Trump could be kept off the New Hampshire ballot for things he’d neither been tried nor convicted. It was a stupid ask, but Scanlan honored the request anyway. His response is … diplomatic.

“There is no mention in the New Hampshire state statute that a candidate in a New Hampshire presidential primary can be disqualified using the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution mentioning insurrection or rebellion,” he told news outlets in a statement. “There is nothing in the 14th Amendment that suggests that exercising the provisions of that amendment should take place during the delegate selection process held by the different states.” …

Mr. Scanlan said that “nothing in our state statue that gives the secretary of state the discretion in entertaining qualification issues once a candidate swears under the penalty of perjury that they meet the qualifications to be president.” He added that once the candidate applies according to the proper procedures, their name “will appear on the ballot.”

He is saying that I, as Secretary of State (SoS), have no legal ground to stand on, but I have a feeling that we’d get a different answer if our SoS was that wacky Dem Colin Van Ostern. Van Ostern stepped up for a shot at the gig two sessions back, but the legislature did not pick him. Had they, he’d likely still be in the job. New Hampshire Secretary of State has a hired-for-life feel that matches only Supreme Court Justices.

That’s a trend unlikely to last, but Scanlan’s response suggests he’d like to remain neutral and so-employed, not that Democrats won’t call him a Trump stooge for following the law. The never-Trumpers might also be miffed, but that didn’t stop Scanlen from expanding on his point.

“At a time when we need U.S. election officials to ensure transparency and build confidence among voters around the country, the delegate selection process should not be the battleground to test this constitutional question,” he added.

A brief note to other states. Whatever you are doing, regardless of if I agree, this isn’t the place to do it. Besides, as I noted here,

Trump running in New Hampshire is good for political tourism. You may not like him, but he will draw a small fortune that fills hotels and restaurants and lights a fire under the local economy. Trump on the Ballot is good for New Hampshire.

And Trump is only ahead about 50 points nationally, though much less in NH, which is also good for New Hampshire. A tighter race makes things exciting and amps up political tourism, which these days might be the only value we get out of any of this.

HT | ZeroHedge

The post NH Sec-o-State Dave Scanlen: No Reason to Keep Trump off NH Primary Ballot appeared first on Granite Grok.