Upgrading “climate change” to the “climate crisis” or applying the term “white supremacy” so promiscuously that it practically encompasses anyone to the right of Gavin Newsom was already abuse of the English language, designed to evoke fear without facts to advance an agenda.

Little did I know that in 2023, we’d be fighting a new term: “paper genocide,” bequeathed upon American political discourse by Sunny Hostin, co-host of “The View.”

“Paper genocide” is when a government decides that buying pornographic LGBT material for middle-school libraries is inappropriate. Since that can never be inappropriate to the left, definitionally, taking books like the infamous “Gender Queer” out of schools is “paper genocide.” Now, of course, if these terms were taken literally, this would mean that various forms of paper were being systematically exterminated by conservatives because they traced their ethnic lineage to trees.

This, of course, is not what she meant. But since “genocide” invokes images like the Holocaust, Rwanda and Xinjiang Province, it’s all good.

The term popped up during Joy Behar’s “Banned Book Club,” essentially a Ron DeSantis hate-segment in which books which are supposedly “banned” from libraries are featured. Never mind that, as conservative media watchdog Newsbusters pointed out, “banned” is a relative term; a previous book club pick, it turned out, was only moved from the elementary school library to the middle school library in a single school district.

But that’s how paper genocide starts. First you begin offering books to appropriate age groups inside public school libraries. The next thing you know, it’s a full-on Nuremberg-style book-burning outside city hall.

This week’s selection was “Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag.” Without citing statistics, Behar said the book about the assassinated gay rights activist and the origins of the pride flag “was one of the most banned picture books last year. They’re so uptight about these books it’s unbelievable.”

“I read this book,” Behar said. “It’s charming. It’s about Harvey Milk and how the whole thing came about. I think kids would like it too. It’s a children’s book.”

So, right at her reading level.

Co-host Ana Navarro said she was “going to take them to Florida and give them away for free” — which, when you can give something away for free, it’s definitionally not banned. And if she gave it to a library in the Sunshine State where students were third-grade or under, it would fall afoul of the Parental Rights in Education Act — the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill — which means they couldn’t accept it. But this “The View” and that kind of reflection doesn’t happen too often.

However, Navarro’s idea was the catalyst for Hostin’s idea on how to fight “paper genocide.”

“That’s a great idea. There are mothers who — I think Ana really touched on something,” Hostin said. “There are mothers’ groups where I live and they’re picking up banned books and giving them back to schools, giving them back to libraries. And there are mobile little libraries filled with banned books.

“And I think maybe that’s the only way that we can stop this paper genocide that we’re seeing of our history,” Hostin continued. “We need to insist that we get these books back out there.”

Again, let me please remind people: If you can give a book to a library as a way to skirt Florida’s crackdown on LGBT porn, it is not banned. There is no “paper genocide” — aside from killing trees for “Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a book which one assumes contains information shallow enough where your kid could just Wikipedia the subjects and save some softwood coniferous trees.

The full segment — which also includes talk about the flag-code violating pride month event at the White House, while assiduously avoiding discussion of the topless transgender “influencers” invited to the event on the South Lawn — can be seen here:

Now, just so we’re clear: The vast majority of these “banned” books are not Harvey Milk biographies or poetry collections that may not be appropriate for elementary school children. Consider the community context note when Chelsea Clinton also tried to defend the infamous “Gender Queer,” the book libs seem most outraged that conservative districts and states are taking out of school libraries, on Twitter:

Yes, the tome contains “visual depictions of oral sex, masturbation and adult sexual contact with a minor.” And if you don’t agree that your child can check that out from his middle-school library, you’re involved in “paper genocide.”

This is, of course, rubbish; if you stood outside a school and started handing out pornography to random students, you’d be arrested, and rightly so. But it’s dangerous rubbish, because the left is insisting that, if you don’t allow your child to be indoctrinated and sexualized by educators, you’re an extremist. You’re the problem. It’s not the graphic LGBT porn in your child’s school, it’s the fact you have an issue with it.

Relax, fanatic. Behar, Navarro, Hostin and Co. say they’ve won this battle. And if you keep resisting, Sunny Hostin might be forced to come up with an even nastier term for you. Although I really don’t know how you top “paper genocide.”

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.