Scott has fallen for the fake story that conservatives are banning books, when in reality school parents are simply requesting that books with sexual content be subject to parental approval, educational, and only available to the proper grade level. Scott selling this lie is a shame, because his piece also makes a rousing defense of reading, which he rightly describes as a transformative activity that can steer its practitioner away from leftist politics as much as towards them.
BIDEN TRIES TO SHAKE LOW MARKS ON THE ECONOMY WITH 'BIDENOMICS' PUSHIndeed, one of the most powerful parts of his essay is when Scott describes how the enlightened and woke school in Brooklyn his kids attended had entire programs geared towards making students “good readers.” To Scott, this killed the entire joy of radical reading, which often means confronting ideas that challenge not just old and musty conservative traditions, but the liberal status quo.
“A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered,” Scott observes, “is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion, and outright refusal on the part of its wards. Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.”
To me, reading has always meant reinforcing or rediscovering deep truths about the human person, while also delving into edgy, challenging, and countercultural books that are deemed dangerous or offensive. I read and loved The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis, and the Bible, but also Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and The Killer Inside Me by pulp fiction master Jim Thompson. I always figured that’s how it should be — this is America, we can read what we want.
I never dreamt that the scolds and censors of books would be liberals. Yet the Left are the ones who are censoring and rewriting books they don’t like, condemning authors, and employing “sensitivity readers” to preemptively “edit” books to remove any “offensive” content.
I myself was once the subject of the Left’s Stasi book censors. When my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court in 2018, opposition researchers tried to ruin him by tying him to me. Part of the plot was to shame me for what I had written and what I had read. “Writings of Brett Kavanaugh’s Classmate Under Scrutiny” announced the headline in USA Today at the time. The main focus was an article I wrote defending male passion and the way it is depicted in the pulp fiction line Hard Case Crime , which are some of my favorite books.
“Judge has defended the way women are depicted in pulp fiction,” sniffed William Cummings, the USA Today reporter. He was right. I have defended (and loved) female characters in dime-story books, especially since female characters in pulp fiction are often smarter and more cunning than the men. Nonetheless, my love of crime books and male passion was decried everywhere from the Washington Post to Stephanie Ruhle, who got the vapors on MSNBC talking about the words I have written.
Of course, these blue noses are the very same people who are now screaming about book bans in Florida. William Cummings, the USA Today reporter who in 2018 wrote an entire article putting me “under scrutiny” for my thoughts and words, is frequently on Twitter decrying Florida’s “banned books.” In response to a claim that a certain version of Sleeping Beauty was being banned (it wasn’t), Cummings defiantly stated , “This was the version of Sleepy Beauty I had as a kid.”
In another tweet blasting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Cummings indignantly defended free speech. “Free speech for thee but not for me,” he sarcastically wrote about would-be censors.
As I have written previously in the Washington Examiner, I can’t even get leftist bookstores, or reporters such as Cummings (and A.O. Scott), to review my latest book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi . Despite being at the center of one of the most explosive political events in recent American political history, and despite every reporter in the country wanting to talk to me at the time, the Left has effectively banned my book from their conversations. Like Witness, Darkness at Noon, or I Choose Freedom, it’s a book the Left just wishes didn’t exist .
Not that the other side is perfect. The Devil’s Triangle, despite its historical importance and several five-star notices on Amazon, has not been mentioned in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, or many other conservative outlets. There is some bad language and some bawdy scenes from the 1980s in the book — maybe that is putting the traditional conservatives off. Or maybe like the Left, they don’t want their assumptions challenged.
In her new book, Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice , Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor at Pepperdine University, compares two different ways of reading — the Thomas Jefferson way and the C.S. Lewis way. Jefferson famously created his own version of the Bible by cutting out everything he didn’t like from the real Bible. This is one way of being a reader — arrogant, “enlightened,” filled with ego and secular will.
Then there is C.S. Lewis, who compared reading to traveling to another country and being willing to mingle with the locals. You come home not full of your own subjective prejudices, but a different person: “You come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature.”
Wilson adds this note for Christians: “If we are poor readers, an encounter with the Word will not do much to make us His people.”
Because so many bookstores and so many college literature departments are run by liberals, it’s assumed that any kind of reading transforms the reader into a liberal or a social justice revolutionary. Yet as Wilson explores so convincingly, reading can not only make you “woke” but bring you into deeper contact with God, which is to be genuinely woke.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICAI will never forget being 12 years old and reading The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time. It was the middle of the summer, I was in my little bedroom in Maryland. When I got to the final pages of The Last Battle, where the joy of eternal life is revealed, I was absolutely frozen in place with unspeakable happiness. I cried.
I want to be able to have that transformative experience and also read about sexy women with guns.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.