Episode 150: Transcript
Fascism and Book Bans (with Maggie Tokuda-Hall)
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:01] Annalee, when was the first time you ever saw a depiction of fascism in a fictional story?
Annalee: [00:00:08] So, I feel like I kind of always knew about the Holocaust because I'm a Jewish kid, you know, something we heard about a lot. But I never made the connection with what that was until I saw the Watership Down animated movie in the 1970s.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:29] So scary.
Annalee: [00:00:29] I mean, it's an amazing movie. It's an amazing novel, which I also read around the same time. And there's a warren of rabbits run by a character named General Woundwart, who is this kind of warrior rabbit who's always like trying to take on the dog that lives nearby and has I guess killed a cat at some point. But he rules over all of the rabbits in the Warren with just an iron claw and is incredibly violent.
[00:01:03] And I remember, partly, I think because it wasn't Nazis, that I could see what fascism was. It wasn't just this one historical event that was associated with this very specific regime. It was a type of leadership, which was violent and cruel and scary. So, I learned about fascism from bunnies is what I'm trying to say.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:27] Yeah, I think for me, I mean, this is gonna shock you, but I think it was Doctor Who. Like, I think Doctor Who—
Annalee: [00:01:32] I am not shocked.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:34] Like, you know, I mean, there was a Star Trek episode where they go to the Nazi planet, and they're like, oh, it's the Nazi planet. And like--
Annalee: [00:01:40] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:40] That, that made zero impression on me, other than that Kirk and Spock spent a lot of their time in that episode shirtless and kind of hugging each other. Which, you know, gosh.
Annalee: [00:01:51] I mean, that is a little bit part of fascism, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:54] I mean, homoeroticism is often deployed in the surface of fascism, which is why fascism is so homophobic.
Annalee: [00:01:59] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:01] I mean, they're homophobic because they don't want their homoeroticism to be, like, noticed or highlighted. But, Doctor Who had this, you know, the Daleks are explicitly Nazis in a lot of classic Doctor Who.
[00:02:11] There's a famous Doctor Who story from the ‘60s where the Daleks actually have a Nuremberg rally. But also, the first Dalek story I ever saw really was “Genesis of the Daleks,” which is just, they go all the way there. They’re wearing Nazi uniforms, they're goose stepping. And Davros, the creator of the Daleks, makes these barn-burning speeches about wiping out inferior life and how strength comes from power and power comes from strength. And it's not subtle at all. It is a show that is just like, this is fascism. We are going to show it to you. We are going to explore it.
Doctor Who Clip: [00:02:49] They talk of democracy, freedom, fairness. Those are the creeds of cowards. The ones who will listen to a thousand viewpoints and try to satisfy them all. Achievement comes through absolute power and power through strength!
Annalee: [00:03:06] I'm just curious, did they actually wear Nazi uniforms, or it's just a very thinly veiled allegory?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:13] I mean, they have uniforms that are very Nazi identified, and I think that, like, I'd have to look this up, but I believe that if you watch “Genesis of the Daleks,” the first two or three episodes of it, the characters are wearing uniforms that have an actual little SS symbol on the side. And then that was just quietly removed. So their uniforms actually changed halfway through the story because someone at the BBC was like, wait a minute, we're going a little too far here.
Annalee: [00:03:40] It's just so interesting to me like when a show, or when a story is about Nazis specifically versus fascists in general. I think it’s...
Charlie Jane: [00:03:50] I mean, they weren't like, they weren't like Nazi-Nazi uniforms, but they had little touches that were borrowed from Nazi uniforms. Their uniforms were mostly just black. They were black outfits, but...
Annalee: [00:04:00] Yeah, they were sort of Nazi-flavored fascists. I was asking because, like I said earlier, I feel like as a kid, because I was raised Jewish, we talked a lot about Nazis. And I remember watching Wonder Woman as a kid, the TV show, and my dad telling me that Wonder Woman was Jewish and was fighting for us, and that that was what Wonder Woman was all about. I was a very little kid so I didn't quite understand all of the realities of the Wonder Woman story. And I feel like, again, that, to me, it made Nazis and Nazi Germany a kind of almost like a fantasy-land, like something ruled over by Sauron.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:39] Right.
Annalee: [00:04:40] It didn't feel real, that somehow when I saw a depiction of totalitarianism with all of the Nazi serial numbers filed off, that's when I really was like, oh, this is why we're upset about Nazis. Like, this is why they're scary. Or this is... it kind of transcended history.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:58] Right, we're, we're gonna get to that later in the episode, but there is actually this thing where pop culture uses Nazis as a symbol, but often that doesn't mean that you're really discussing fascism and what fascism means.
[00:05:11] Like, Nazis can turn up without any real exploration of what fascism means, and you can have an exploration of fascism that doesn't explicitly invoke Nazi imagery.
[00:05:20] So I mean, my whole life I feel like science fiction and fantasy have been warning us about the danger of fascism and what happens when a democratic society falls under the sway of a charismatic leader who uses fear mongering and scapegoating to mobilize people to destructive ends.
[00:05:35] And somehow all of this insistent clamor and warning has not been enough because as you might have noticed, fascism is making a huge comeback right now, and I'm honestly pretty scared.
Annalee: [00:05:46] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:46] So today, we're going to talk about fascism in genre fiction, and why it seems that we've forgotten the lessons of the mid-20th century.
[00:05:55] You're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that has all of its papers in order. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, I'm the author of a young adult trilogy that starts with Victories Greater Than Death, plus, some comics. You can buy New Mutants: Lethal Legion in your local comic book store right now.
Annalee: [00:06:13] And I am Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. My latest novel is The Terraformers and I have a forthcoming non fiction book called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. And I deal a lot with fascism in that book.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:32] And on our mini episode this coming week, we're going to be talking about how Annalee and I write about fascism in our own work and why it's so hard to imagine fascism from the inside.
Annalee: [00:06:43] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? That's right. If you become a patron, just give us, you know, five bucks a month, ten bucks, whatever you can afford, you are making this podcast happen.
[00:07:00] Plus, you get mini episodes with every episode. You get access to our discord channel where we hang out all the time. So think about it. All of that and more could be yours for just a few bucks a month. Anything you give goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect
[00:07:22] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:07:55] Alright, so before we go any further, I just want to acknowledge that this is a really serious topic and this is scary to a lot of people right now, including us. We're going to try and be really sensitive about the topic of fascism while also trying to make sense of how we got here and particularly how science fiction and fantasy have tried to warn us, but maybe didn't quite warn us hard enough.
[00:08:16] So, okay. Let's start off by defining our terms. Annalee, I know that you've studied and written a lot about the mass psychology of fascism. So, what have you learned?
Annalee: [00:08:25] So, I'm definitely not a world expert on this, but I think a really great resource for thinking about the issues is a book that came out in 1950 called The Authoritarian Personality, which was a long range research study that was conducted by four academics who were actually at UC Berkeley at the time.
[00:08:50] And, it was kind of led by this psychologist named Elsa Frenkel-Brunswik, who was administering tests to students at Berkeley, as well as people in the Bay Area community from different class backgrounds. And she was trying to figure out how you could suss out who was likely to have authoritarian tendencies.
[00:09:14] And so, over many iterations of this test, she and her colleagues, one of whom was a grad student of hers, one was a colleague, and one was the famous philosopher Theodor Adorno, they refined this test down to what they called the F-scale test, and F stood for fascist. And what they did was they asked people questions about how they felt about disciplining children, but also how they felt about people of different ethnic backgrounds, how they felt about religion and superstition, and also what they thought about sexuality.
[00:09:48] And these questions were all kind of mixed together and sanitized a bit so the idea was that you wouldn't necessarily know that you were being asked these somewhat intimate questions about your beliefs. And what they found was that in general, there was a pattern to people who were drawn to authoritarian politicians.
[00:10:10] They were often people who'd been physically abused as children, and I don't... when I say abused, obviously that's modern day language. It was kids who'd been physically disciplined as children in the language of that time. So, people who had authoritarian parents. It was also people who were very suspicious of minorities, people who expressed disgust at any kind of sexuality outside marriage. And also they tended to be people who were drawn to superstition and astrology.
And again, this was partly at the time the questions that they asked framed the answers. And so, they specifically asked about astrology to see if people had kind of what they considered superstitious tendencies. So yeah, this became very influential among psychologists and sociologists trying to understand why fascism breaks out at certain times.
[00:11:06] And one of the big answers is that this type of person is really disturbed by social change. And so social change, especially rapid social change, tends to push people toward their more authoritarian tendencies. But you could have an authoritarian personality and never become a fascist. Like, it could just remain latent. But certain kinds of social issues push people's buttons and brought that out.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:34] Yeah. That was super helpful and actually made me think a lot about what we're living through right now. It's kind of shocking how well that maps onto the world of today.
Annalee: [00:11:43] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:43] So when we were starting to work on this episode, we thought a lot about the fact that a lot of classic science fiction was created by people who had lived through the 1940s and had witnessed fascism firsthand. For example, a lot of people point to the movie Starship Troopers, which was based on a novel by Robert A. Heinlein. And Heinlein did actually kind of serve in the army during World War II. But this novel was turned into a much more trenchant anti-fascist satire by director Paul Verhoeven, who was born in 1938. So he was a kid when the Nazis were rampaging across Europe and he was from the Netherlands.
[00:12:22] And in 2018, Verhoeven told The Guardian that he actually hated Heinlein's novel. He never managed to finish reading it. He found it overly male militaristic. He found it borderline fascist, but he decided to make a movie that essentially skewered that novel using openly fascist imagery and being very on the nose about depicting fascism. And there's this one particularly famous speech.
S Troopers Clip: [00:12:43] Force, my friends, is violence, the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. Naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:53] He basically was like, I lived through this, I am going to put it out there.
Annalee: [00:12:57] Yeah, I think it's so interesting because one of the things that's really clear from the movie is, he's not just skewering old school fascism, he's also skewering corporate fascism.
[00:13:10] So, the movie is structured around these kind of propaganda ads where you, the viewer, are kind of poking your way through an interface, like looking at... following links, basically. And some of those links take you to, like I said, just sort of corporate advertising. But sometimes it's corporate-sponsored war, and so he obviously was critical of a lot of different types of authoritarianism.
[00:13:39] And really, it’s true. People could not handle how satirical that movie was. It was quite misunderstood at the time. I loved it. I mean, it's always fun to make fun of fascists.
[00:13:50] And you know, we, you and I have also talked a lot before about how early science fiction and even some recent science fiction actually has promoted eugenics and race science, which is obviously an undercurrent in Starship Troopers. And in fact, we talked on a previous episode to Alec Nevala-Lee about John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, which was an incredibly influential science fiction magazine in the mid-century. And Campbell had openly fascist tendencies. He wrote a lot about the joys of eugenics in a column for that magazine. And a lot of science fiction was comfortable with, you could call it a soft form of fascism until probably the 1960s. And it's really in the ‘60s that you start to see, a new wave of science fiction authors like Samuel Delany and Ursula Le Guin challenging fascist themes and writing overtly anti-fascist stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:46] Yeah, I started to wonder as we were researching this episode if there's like a division between the people who were adults during World War II versus people like Verhoeven who were kids during World War II and who witnessed it from a very different perspective. And then you also have a lot of pop culture coming up, especially in the ‘60s, where people are kind of making fun of the scary thing. Like, Mel Brooks, who amazingly is still alive and was born in 1926 makes The Producers, which is this hilarious satire where Hitler is kind of lampooned. And you have Hogan's Heroes is a show about like a Nazi prison camp which was made entirely by Jews who had lived through the 1930s. This is people who knew how terrible the Nazis were. They knew firsthand and they were choosing to laugh at them as opposed to some other pop culture, we'll get to this more later in the episode, but other pop culture that kind of makes fun of the Nazis, but doesn't really understand them.
[00:15:44] Like the movie Life is Beautiful, which doesn't feel like it actually gets to the heart of what was the problem with the Nazis.
Annalee: [00:15:49] Yeah, one of the folks who contributed to the authoritarian personality that I was talking about earlier, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, actually had a lot of harsh words about using satire to cope with fascism.
[00:16:07] He was Jewish, he had fled the Nazis, along with a number of his colleagues. And he felt that Charlie Chaplin had really done the world a disservice in his movie The Great Dictator, which comes out in 1940 and makes fun of this fantasy version of Hitler who is a total bumbling fool.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:24] Oh.
Annalee: [00:16:24] And Adorno felt like that was basically minimizing the problem. It was kind of trivializing it to satirize it.
[00:16:37] But at the same time, you know, there were fascists who made great use of comedy. So, people like Lord Ha Ha, who was a British fascist that went over to the Nazi side and broadcast these incredibly popular radio shows making fun of the Allies, and people in England listened in because he was genuinely funny.
[00:16:56] So, it became this kind of double-edged sword, I think, where people wanted to use satire to bring the Nazis down a peg, including in science fiction that satirizes them, but also people who'd seen them first hand were like, you know, humor can be used in all kinds of ways. Maybe, be careful.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:18] Yeah, I mean, I feel like we've definitely seen that in recent years too, like using humor and satire against fascism feels like a good idea because it's so inherently absurd, but it often either does the thing of minimizing that you talked about, or it just sort of plays into the sense of victimization that fascists love to kind of like wallow in.
[00:17:38] So then, what's interesting is that, you have all this trenchant kind of anti-fascist pop culture being made by people who were, I think, mostly kids in the ‘30s and ‘40s. And then at a certain point you have baby boomers, people who were born after World War II, starting to make pop culture that uses the iconography of the 1940s without necessarily grappling with the ideology that lies behind it.
[00:18:04] And you know, these are people who grew up seeing World War II in their pop culture rather than actually living through World War II.
Annalee: [00:18:10] Yeah, they were responding to World War II as a kind of entertainment event, as opposed to something that had harmed people. And I think this is the moment where you have kind of what we were talking about this as the Tarantino generation, where you get things like Inglorious Bastards, which is an alternate history of World War II, or Indiana Jones, where, you know, there's this sort of fantasy sci-fi angle, which is put on to the same cast of characters in that you have in Inglourious Bastards.
[00:18:47] Nazis become kind of camp in a way. They're like werewolves or zombies. They're monsters. I definitely feel like that was how they were presented to me as a kid, which I was alluding to a little bit earlier, where Nazis felt like monsters that were not related to a political system. They were just somebody that Wonder Woman was like trying to destroy.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:12] It's an easy shorthand. It's just like somebody shows up with a swastika on their arm and it's just like, oh, this is a bad guy. You know, pew pew pew. We don't have to think about why they're a bad guy or what makes them a bad guy.
[00:19:27] Yeah, recently, I was stuck in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere and I rewatched the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and I had forgotten that there's this moment where Indiana Jones meets Hitler and it's sort of like, Spielberg is smart enough to make it kind of a scary moment. Like it's this chilling moment.
Annalee: [00:19:44] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:44] But it's sort of this one moment and then five seconds later we're back to the wacky hijinks and at no point do we really get into who this guy is and why he’s a problem. And that whole sequence where they just breeze into Berlin, steal a thing from the Nazis and breeze out is just very kind of silly in general.
[00:20:03] And you know, George Lucas, another baby boomer, is just using World War II iconography a lot in the original Star Wars trilogy. There's actual stormtroopers, the henchmen of the bad guy are called stormtroopers.
Annalee: [00:20:18] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:18] It's very on the nose. But fascism is not really explored in any meaningful way in Star Wars until you get to Attack of the Clones in 2002, where you have that amazing moment where they're like, this is how freedom dies, to thunderous applause.
[00:20:31] And that's actually Lucas finally trying to think about what fascism is and where it comes from. And I actually... researching this episode kind of left me with the feeling that oftentimes featuring Nazis, like actual Nazis, in your story as bad guys is a way to avoid thinking about the nature of fascism, because Nazis are just such an easy shorthand. And it almost feels like like, oftentimes stories will do one or the other. They will either think deeply about fascism, or they will slap a Nazi uniform on somebody, but they'd seldom do both.
[00:21:05] Like, once you've got actual Nazis on screen and swastikas and Hitler and stuff, it keeps people from actually thinking about what fascism really is.
Annalee: [00:21:15] Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the bad apple theory of history where there was this one group of guys who wore this one type of uniform that were really bad. It's not that it's an ongoing political movement that was also popular in lots of other places and continues to be.
[00:21:32] So, okay, what do you think are the defining characteristics of stories about fascism? Like, not Nazis, but fascism?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:39] Yeah, I think that a lot of speculative fiction deals with the problem of scapegoating. Like, you have one marginalized group or sometimes it's one individual, but usually it's a marginalized group who is turned into an enemy or a victim, who is kind of highlighted and shown to be both dangerous and depraved and in need of being destroyed. This is a theme in a lot of stories about mutants, like the X-Men.
[00:22:04] Oftentimes, the X-Men become the metaphorical oppressed minority in a story about fascism. You have political leaders who are trying to use the X-Men to kind of gain power by fear-mongering and stuff. The chrysalids are kind of a similar type situation. Stories about post-human characters often become metaphors for fascism. You have a lot of stories where one individual is singled out for collective destruction. And it's sort of a weird metaphor for fascism, like “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. There's a manufactured panic about a group or an individual.
Annalee: [00:22:44] Yeah, exactly. And where there's this idea that the entire civilization rests on secretly harming this group of individuals, whether they're aliens or mutants.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:56] Yeah. And you know, another motif that I think you see a lot in science fiction from the latter half of the 20th century is people who say that they are just following orders.
Annalee: [00:23:10] Oh yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:10] This is always highlighted as a bad thing. Creators in countless science fiction stories and TV shows and movies go out of their way to point at the guy who says, I was just following orders when I did this terrible thing and say, that guy is bad. Don't be like that guy. And it’s a way of thinking about the banality of evil, because that is what a lot of Nazis said after World War II. And it's what a lot of people caught up in atrocities and horrible abuses and crimes against humanity will say. They'll just be like, well, it wasn't my fault, I just did what I was told.
[00:23:46] And I feel like it's perfectly encapsulated by this one line that Jean-Luc Picard speaks in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
TNG Clip: [00:23:52] The claim, I was only following orders, has been used to justify too many tragedies in our history.
Annalee: [00:23:59] I think we also see stories like Fahrenheit 451, which comes out in the mid-20th century, which are also attempts to truly be about fascism and not about specific Nazis. And that's, again about, censorship and book bans, essentially. Book bans with fire. and there's a mass movement around the idea of eradicating references to history and to subversions.
[00:24:30] And then I feel like there's this moment that I want to ask you about, which is, we were talking earlier about how the generation who lived through World War II, starts to die out, fade away, and we get this kind of trivializing of fascism.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:48] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:24:50] Where do you see that?
Charlie Jane: [00:24:51] I mean, I see it all over the place. I see it, like we talked about Indiana Jones and like how Nazis are just an easy signifier, but also, you have a lot of superhero stories that kind of wave at fascism.
Annalee: [00:25:04] Mm-hmm.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:05] And you have superheroes who kind of stand in for fascist leaders, but you also have superheroes who are battling fascism.
[00:25:11] There was this moment in 2015 where I felt like two movies came out around the same time. Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War, and both of those movies sort of vaguely wanted to kind of say something about fascism but they didn't really know what to say and they kind of were just like, hand-wave, hand-wave, hand-wave.
Annalee: [00:25:31] Yeah, I also always think about the Hitler reacts meme, which is like—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:37] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:25:37] —piece of a German movie about Hitler where Bruno Gans—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:43] It’s called Downfall.
Annalee: [00:25:43] Downfall, right, right, right. And so, Bruno Gans, who's a German actor, is playing Hitler, and the joke that you see is he's yelling and freaking out more and more and more, and the subtitles are changed from what he's actually saying to whatever.
[00:25:57] Like, he's like, I can't believe that ending of the first season of Game of Thrones! Or like some other... He's having like a fan meltdown or some other kind of meltdown, and it's like, Hitler at that point has just become pure theater. It's not at all about Hitler as Hitler. It's like, he's just an angry, zany guy. And it could just be anyone yelling about Game of Thrones is the same thing as ordering the deaths of millions of people.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:26] I mean, Hitler is basically, at that point, the piano playing cat, like, he's basically, like...
Annalee: [00:26:31] Yeah!
Charlie Jane: [00:26:32] He’s like, you know...
Annalee: [00:26:34] He’s Skibid Toilet.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:36] He’s Nyan Cat. He’s basically Hitler, just, he’s Hamster Dance. Hitler becomes the Hamster Dance at some point in the 2010s and I can't possibly imagine what bad things that would lead to, but... I think that there's a line about how people who forget history are doomed to do something or other, but I forget how it goes.
Annalee: [00:26:55] Yeah. maybe we'll find out when we come back after the break and talk to Maggie Tokuda-Hall about her experiences with book bans.
[00:27:02] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:06] And now we're so excited to be joined by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, a friend of the pod and one of our favorite people. Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the author of several books for children and young adults, including the incredible duology that begins with The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, the graphic novel Squad, the upcoming The Worst Ronin, which I haven't... I'm so excited to read it soon, and the acclaimed children's book Love in the Library, which is an account of how her grandparents met in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and I didn't mean for that to sound so cheerful, but you know.
[00:27:39] Currently she's working with Authors Against Book Bans, a group that works with PEN America to challenge book bans in school libraries. And this is the second time we're having Maggie. We're so glad that she's back. Welcome back to the pod, Maggie.
Maggie: [00:27:52] Thank you so much for having me. It's so cool to be a guest on one of my favorite shows.
Annalee: [00:28:00] Well, it's always great to have you on. So, Maggie, I expect a lot of our listeners are familiar with your books, partly because we talk about them all the time on the pod, because they're so great. But they probably also know you as the person who called out Scholastic last year. And this was after they offered to license your book, Love in the Library, as long as you removed the word racism from the introduction. And you said no very loudly, which many of us appreciated. And I wonder if you could start by just telling us how that experience gave you a window on the way book bans are transforming the publishing industry.
Maggie: [00:28:37] Yeah, absolutely. So Scholastic's offer for me was if I had removed the word racism from my author's note, my licensing deal was contingent on me removing the word racism and talking about how what had happened to my grandparents was not a single moment, an aberrant moment in American history, but rather part of like this larger American tradition. And they did it... in their email to me they said because they were worried about the volatility of the marketplace right now and sensitivity to terms like racism. Which is bullshit.
Annalee: [00:29:10] Yeah.
Maggie: [00:29:10] And basically what they were saying is we want to have diverse voices like yours, but we don't want them to, offend the kind of people who would ban books. And so I said no. And I was really adamant that if I was ever going to accept a deal with Scholastic, I needed to know that they were doing something to fight book bans. Because that was ultimately what this was about, was they were trying to cater to this rising culture of book banning, while still giving lip service to what they say in their corporate credo matters to them like lift every voice or whatever. And I don't think that Scholastic is unique in that at all. I think all publishers do this kind of performative diverse voice cultivation while still giving marketing money to their standby cis white guy authors. So I don't mean to demonize Scholastic particularly, it's just that they are the ones who were wild enough to give me that offer with crazy receipts attached.
[00:30:11] But I want to be clear that when I came out about this, my text messages, email, and DMs all blew up with people with similar stories from a variety of publishing houses. Other people from Scholastic, but also from all of the major five publishers have dealt with these kinds of requests that were inappropriate being made about their work, and it was almost entirely from other marginalized authors. To me, it was an indication that this is going on all the time.
[00:30:39] This was not, again, an aberrant moment in publishing history. This was part of a larger system where this is happening all the time. And because of what I did with Scholastic, I started getting a lot of speaking engagements. And one of them was to speak in Idaho at their Idaho Library Association's kind of like big annual meeting.
[00:31:06] And the ILA is different from the ALA, the American Library Association. It's its own group with its own legal counsel. And in Idaho right now, they are fighting really, truly hideous state-level bills around book banning that do things like make librarians criminally and financially liable for carrying any books that somebody finds offensive.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:28] Oh, wow.
Annalee: [00:31:28] Wow.
Maggie: [00:31:27] With fines up, in some cases, with fines up to $25,000 per title. So that means, like, if you carried the Heartstopper series, you could be out $125,000 just like that because somebody was offended by a beautiful...
Annalee: [00:31:46] Yeah, of course, targeting librarians, you know, people who absolutely cannot afford that at all.
Maggie: [00:31:52] And even if the libraries could afford it, in some cases, one of the things that people from the ILA made really clear to me is that some of these libraries that are facing these things are rural libraries without a lot of funding. Like, they have, like, a yearly budget of $60,000. So taking a $125,000 risk just isn't feasible for them. That means defunding that library entirely and putting it into debt.
[00:32:17] And so I got really, I would say radicalized, about how I feel about this by Idaho, by watching what really smart people on the ground there are trying to do to stop this from happening, but understanding the breadth of what we're up against, which is this incredible organization on the right. They're extremely disciplined using particular talking points around it that are really effective at scaring people into allowing these bans to happen. They say things like these books are pornography, that librarians and teachers are grooming children so that they can... because they're pedophiles and because they want to like sexually predate on them. And it's really ugly stuff. And the people who have been fighting this fight for a long time have been very alone.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:04] Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I was really struck. I went into the meeting of the Texas Library Association a couple years ago, and it was just heartbreaking to talk to librarians from like rural places.
[00:33:17] And like, I was on a panel of LGBTQ authors, and somebody stood up during the Q&A and was like, why should we spend our library's resources on buying your books when we're just gonna have to pull them off the shelves immediately afterwards? And the only answer anybody could give on the panel was because you have to fight this, because there's no other way, you have to, keep fighting this and it's, it's really hard to have to make that argument.
[00:33:41] I know my book has been, Victories Greater Than Death was banned in Tennessee. I have no idea how many other places librarians just chose to not get it in the first place because they knew that they would have to take it down.
Maggie: [00:33:51] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:51] I have no idea how that's affected my book or how that's affected similar books.
[00:33:56] So, getting back to the thing you mentioned before about how your DMs blew up. You heard from all these other authors with various publishing companies who were dealing with similar things. I feel like there's been a lot of talk lately about how, part of how censorship works is through self-censorship.
Maggie: [00:34:11] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:11] That they don't have to come down on you because you will limit yourself. And I know that I self censor all the time. So, I'm not just pointing fingers at others. I know I do it too. We all do it. I guess my question for you is how effective is this? And how do we fight back against the self-censorship part of this?
Maggie: [00:34:35] That's such a good question. And it's something I struggle with myself because I have the disposition of a golden retriever who wants everyone to like me. And so it's really hard for me to put myself in situations where I know I'm going to be offending people and things like that. But one of the things that I whisper to myself all the time is that the best and most ecstatic part of being an artist is creating work that only you could make.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:03] Oh my God, I love that.
Maggie: [00:35:04] And if you're kind of doing this for the sake of selling more copies or you're self censoring yourself in the hopes of not offending anyone, you are surrendering the best part of the job and the only part of the job that ultimately matters, like the part that informs your soul and will make you feel accomplished and full and fulfilled with what you have done with your life.
[00:35:27] We know that capitalism is cruel and unfair and capricious and so letting go of every book needing to be the biggest success of all time and a New York Times bestseller and everybody loves it because those are not real goals that you have any control over and surrendering yourself to the actual art of it and asking yourself well, which parts are the parts that only I can make and that I have to make because I'm the only person who can do this and I will be up all night thinking about this. These are the things that matter to me, this is the art I choose to make, is the only part that will matter to you at the end of the day, and when you do that kind of work, it makes you so much more powerful in defending it.
[00:36:09] One of the things that I learned the hard way with Love in the Library was because that story is so important to me, because it's my grandparents’ story, it's not just my story, and because I felt this obligation to this larger community to tell it right, and to tell it honestly, that when it came time to defend it, I was able to do that with a lot more fire than I think I would be for some of the fiction that I've written where I was just sort of like responding to criticisms or whatever and kind of like playing 3D chess.
[00:36:44] That work is harder to defend for me because it's not really mine and it's not speaking to something essential about what I see and understand about the world. But with Love in the Library or even with Squad which has been banned I think, six times that I'm aware of now.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:00] Wow.
Maggie: [00:37:00] I feel really adamant in how I defend it because that is the book of my secret ugly heart and it is about the rape culture that I grew up in and it is about so many things that are so central to how I understand the world, that when anyone else had the balls to look at me and go that's not right I am able to come back at them with the full force of my fury because I knew that that book is true.
[00:37:22] I know that that book is true. But one kind of informs the other. When you do the brave thing in making it, it will embolden you to be braver when you have to defend it. And there will always come a time as an artist where you have to defend your work in one way or another. And so, one thing that when I speak to other writers that I always say is like you should really ask yourself if you are up to the task of being an artist, because some of that means being able to sit with other people's discomfort.
Annalee: [00:37:53] Yeah. I wanted to go back to what you were saying earlier about how you heard from a lot of other writers, but also you met with librarians in places where they're really dealing with a lot of these book bans. And I wonder if you could just give us a sense of how these organizations work who push for book bans. Like, how can we recognize them? How do they? Do they have like a pattern of attack?
Maggie: [00:38:19] Yes. They attack the same 50 books over and over and over again. The Hate U Give, All Boys Aren't Blue, Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe. Like, there are their greatest hits that they love to point out and be like, look at the pornography, or whatever. And they have these things, these packets called book looks, where the people who receive them don't need to have read the book. They just pull the most salacious thing that they can find from a book and say, look at what they're trying to give to your kids.
[00:38:52] And so what is so awful about these book bans is that people on the far right, and I would just want to be really frank that I believe that this is a fascist movement and so fascists on the far right have figured out that there are so many Americans with easily inflamed bigotries that this is a really expeditious way to defund institutions of public learning whether that's public schools or libraries, and so they don't give a fuck that it is actually also a permission structure for violence against these marginalized bodies and identities that they represent.
[00:39:25] They have this larger goal. And the foot soldiers in it, I don't think are aware of that at all. They just have easily inflamed bigotries that they find certain things scary and they are willing to throw down on that. And they are able to do this with very little effort on their part. So they distribute these book looks and then a parent or somebody from the community can just go to a school or in some cases directly to the police as we've seen in Florida and say like, look at the pornography that they're giving to our kids. You got to do something about this. You have to go pull this off the shelves right now. Otherwise you're a groomer and you're a pedophile and you’re all these horrible, hateful, scary things, and it puts teachers and educators and librarians in this impossible position because they are already defending underfunded institutions that are understaffed and just generally do not have the institutional support that they ought to have. And so it was an easily disrupted infrastructure.
[00:40:31] So, the pattern that I think you can see is that what we're seeing with this exponential rise in book bans is not like... It used to be like, oh, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark because it's too scary or Harry Potter because it's about witchcraft. All the intense Christians were like, that's too much. And now you're like, but she's a TERF. Don't you like her now? And they're like, nope, too bad.
[00:40:56] Or, like, in progressive communities, it'll be like pull Little House on the Prairie from the shelves. Like, those are the kinds of things that we saw previously. And when we had book banning discussions, that was what it was about.
[00:41:09] As of 2020, we have seen an exponential rise in attacks that particularly target books about LGBTQ identities or from authors who are LGBTQ+ or about Bblack experience, Black lived experience. And particularly where those identities intersect are extremely threatening to these groups.
[00:41:32] And so I do not think that it is a coincidence that after the summer of 2020, when we saw multiracial coalitions of children really stepping up to protest state-sanctioned racism in our country, we saw this exponential rise in these kinds of bans. To me, it feels very of a pattern and of a known playbook at this point.
[00:41:57] And now that they've really taken the guesswork out and are attacking the funding so directly and making it a criminal offense for these librarians and teachers to disseminate books in some cases that they haven't read either, but they bought in a large packet because they trusted the expertise of many other people who, in an entire industry, built around, you know, creating book sales and making sure that new books are available to readers at a reasonable clip.
[00:42:28] They've made it really frightening and unsafe for those people.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:29] Yeah, I mean, I worry that this is going to have a long term effect on kids learning to fall in love with reading that we're gonna lose a generation of readers as a result of this.
Maggie: [00:42:38] Absolutely.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:38] I also feel like this is part of, like you said, it's part of a pattern. There's also been a lot of bomb threats and threats of violence against schools and libraries in the past two or three years.
[00:42:52] We’re seeing, even in supposedly progressive places like New York City, we're seeing library funding cut to make room for more money for the police, which is like just so on the nose. If someone wrote a satire where they were like, we're closing the library so that we can have more armed police officers.
Maggie: [00:43:11] And positioning police outside the closed libraries to tell people that they're closed?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:16] I know, it's just...
Maggie: [00:43:16] How much are we paying for this in New York? It’s—
Charlie Jane: [00:43:19] If you wrote this as a satire people would be like, it's too on the nose. It's too on the nose.
Maggie: Yeah, they'd be like, shut it down, Anthony Borowitz, we get it.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:26] Pretty much, yeah. Pretty much. So tell us, I guess, pivoting to something that's a little bit more hopeful.
Maggie: [00:43:34] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:34] Please tell us about the organization that you're helping to start, Authors Against Book Bans. How are we fighting back? How can people get involved? What's your game plan for saving the world?
Maggie: [00:43:45] Okay, well. Wow. Okay. So, I don't know.
Annalee: [00:43:50] No pressure, no pressure.
Maggie: [00:43:50] So we're like a very single issue group. So it's Authors Against Book Bans. We are what we say on the tin. It is people who create books against book bans. And we're maintaining a white-hot laser focus on that issue so that we can be as effective as possible. Because one of the things that we have noticed and where we really differentiate from a lot of the other sort of like free speech speech, anti-censorship groups, is that there are so many adjacent fights that need to be fought, that all these groups get stretched really thin. PEN America? Stretched really thin. Every Library? Stretched really thin. ALA, God knows, very stretched thin. Authors Guild, all these places who, with all these great organizations doing great work specifically around book banning, all have many issues that they need to be fighting and talking about and educating their membership about at any given time.
[00:44:43] Authors Against Book Bans is razor focused on this for two reasons. One, so that we can be nimble and we can be present for all these things, and also so that we can partner with all of these groups that are doing all of this kind of work. And we're trying to treat ourselves like the author army that is ready to be deployed.
[00:45:04] We're not trying to tell other people how to do this work most of the time because there is really great work happening at the grassroots level. It's just about making sure that they know that we are there to support them and getting the authors there to support them. And so, in some cases, some of our membership live in places where this is going to be coming up.
[00:45:24] We had one of our first success stories. Four of our members went to a Texas school board meeting. There were 24 people at the meeting. 10 were for the book bans, 10 were against, and then there were four authors. And we came out victorious and even some of the school board members said it was the author's presence that like really changed their minds because hearing professionals speak about this made a big difference.
[00:45:48] So sometimes it'll be stuff. That is that intense because showing up in person and testifying in front of people who hate you is an intense job and not everybody wants to is going to be geographically able or willing to do that kind of work and that is very fair. But there's also a lot of work to be done doing things like writing letters of support to the librarians and educators who are fighting this stuff.
[00:46:11] One of the number one things I took away from ILA and I have had kind of hammered home for me by everybody who's been in this fight for longer is that for many of the people on the grassroots level who are fighting this, this is the first time that they have ever been in conflict with their own community.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:30] Oh, man.
Maggie: [00:46:30] It's really scary and it's really isolating. They know that what they're doing is right, right? Like, they think it's right. Right, guys? Right? But then when they look around, nobody in their community is stepping up the same way they are, and they feel scared. And they have every right to. And so one of the things we really want to make sure that we're doing with our organization, that other groups can't do because they're not an author-only, book ban focused group, is provide that support.
[00:46:58] There's going to be a lot of places where we're not welcome, that they're not interested in hearing from anyone outside of the community, and so we're not welcome at the school board meeting, we're not going to be welcome at that library board meeting, whatever it is, but we can still be the person standing behind these educators, saying, no, you go get him. You go fucking get him. You're doing the right thing. We love you. You're perfect. You're beautiful.
[00:47:20] And that we see them and we appreciate them because it is shocking how little of that they are hearing from their own communities a lot of the time. And so knowing that they are part of this broader fight and that they are seen and appreciated and loved for what they are doing is essential work. And so some of it is gonna be stuff like that.
[00:47:37] We are also working really hard to keep our membership educated about state level legislation that they should be aware of. There are really frightening bills in Idaho, Utah, South Carolina, West Virginia, just passed one that actually does make librarians criminally liable for carrying books that, quote, “someone” takes objection to.
Annalee: [00:47:58] Wow.
Maggie: [00:48:00] Someone. Not like, an expert.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:01] Any random person. Just one random dude.
Maggie: [00:48:04] Just a guy.
Annalee: [00:48:05] Just that guy in the garbage can who just kind of drove up.
Maggie: [00:48:09] Yeah. No, but literally, that is how it often works.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:13] Oscar the Grouch. Literally, you just described Oscar the Grouch.
Maggie: [00:48:14] Yeah, that fucking asshole.
[00:48:18] So, there are a lot of things to be aware of, and there are times where we have organized already, like, all of our authors in New Jersey to write to their state senator and say, as an author, here's what I think about this state bill that you're bringing forward, here's my problem with it, or here's my support for it. And also keeping an eye on the good legislation that is coming through, because there are places like Illinois where some cursory but not complete legislation has been passed to try to protect libraries from some of these things, like bans on book bans, type legislation.
[00:48:53] And there's more of that happening on the national level, as well. And so there's just so much work to be done just in this particular space. And we're trying to make sure that authors are present in every one of these conversations that is happening because we can speak to this issue with expertise and passion and eloquence that may not be available to somebody who hasn't made this their life's purpose.
Annalee: [00:49:17] And where can people find out more information about Authors Against Book Bans and find out how they can help?
Maggie: [00:49:24] Yeah, so if you've ever had your name on a book, if you're indie published, if you're traditionally published, if you are an illustrator, a translator, an editor of anthologies, we want you. It was too wordy to say, authors, illustrators, translators, editors of anthologies, anyone whose name has ever been on a book against book bans. So we settled with our authors against book bans.
Annalee: [00:49:47] Fair enough.
Maggie: [00:49:47] Everyone is welcome. This is a big tent because there is a lot of strength in numbers here and being able to say to publishers, hey, we represent, right now, 1,200 authors, but I'm hoping more like 5,000, 10,000 authors, and we need you to do more. Here's a letter from all 10,000 of us saying you have to do better.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:06] Hell yeah.
Maggie: [00:50:06] That volume really matters. And so we need everybody to join. You can find links to join on our website, authorsagainstbookbans.com. You can also find us on Instagram, authorsagainstbookbans. I mean, we took the guesswork out. It's pretty easy to find it.
[00:50:22] And some people will be super involved. They'll go to school board meetings. They want to be a part of it. But we also just need that volume. So even if you just want to sign up so that you get an email once every two or three weeks with some updates about stuff that's going on, or maybe you want to drop into a meeting that we hold where we have education opportunities with some of our partner groups. like PEN America, but not limited to. So we're also working with Every Library and SCBWI and the Authors Guild and the PRH legal team that is heading up the lawsuit against Escambia County in Florida. Like, we have so many wonderful partners in this and there are so many ways to be involved with varying levels of commitment. And so everybody is welcome. If you just sign up and we never hear from you again, you are still my best friend forever.
Annalee: [00:51:10] Wow. That's a pretty good promise.
Maggie: [00:51:13] If you sign up and you come to a school board meeting, like, that is also incredible and we're so grateful to have you. But like, the spectrum of involvement is wide. And, first and foremost, we need volume, so please join us.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:27] Yeah, so one final question, Maggie. The first half of this episode we were talking about fascism and how hard it is to kind of grapple with fascism in narrative and how oftentimes we just have fascists kind of turn up as cartoon villains but we don't really interrogate them.
Maggie: [00:51:43] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:44] How can authors, in addition to authors organized against book bans, how do we grapple with fascism in our storytelling? How do we use storytelling to convince people to not embrace these bigotries that you talked about, these easily activated bigotries. How do we use our power as authors to kind of fight back against that?
Maggie: [00:52:05] God, that's such a good question. Like in our work? Like what are the strategies?
Charlie Jane: [00:52:08] Mm-hmm.
Maggie: [00:52:08] I mean, I think they're so varied and I feel like I have what I feel like is my way that I deal with this and it comes back to that like writing the story that only you can tell. That focus on the reverence for individual life, I think, is often a thing that is missed and a thing that we miss in ourselves when we surrender that kind of ecstatic joyous part of us that does art for the sake of making art. Art, in general, I think, stands against fascism if you are doing it to its utmost calling, right?
[00:52:48] Like if you are doing the thing because you feel driven to because it is so uniquely your own and nobody else could accomplish it, you are already on that path, right? Because fascism is so much about obedience, and so anything you can do to be disobedient is great.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:03] Hell yeah.
Maggie: [00:53:04] But I keep coming back to Timothy Snyder's, On Tyranny. And chapter fucking one of the book is do not obey in advance.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:15] Mm-hmm.
Maggie: [00:53:16] So the number one thing that authors can do is to not self censor themselves and to write the more sort of jingoist, pablum type books that they think might sell more because people will be more permissive of it.
[00:53:32] Your job as an artist is not to bolster the already powerful. The job of the artist is to tear down walls. From my point of view. I feel like the absolute best thing you can do is force yourself to reckon with yourself more honestly so that when you come to your work, you are bringing the most authentic and difficult parts of your own psyche and imagination to the page and allowing your readers to engage with that as well because that kind of effort creates empathy in other people. It helps them better understand the particularities of another mind. Maybe it's yours, maybe it's a person you made up. It doesn't matter. That exercise of forcing yourself to see outside of yourself is so essential to creating a bolster against fascism.
[00:54:24] Like, one of the other chapters talks a lot about, in Timothy Snyder's books, how knowing your neighbors really well is one of the things you can do to fight against fascism. And I would extend that to being your neighbors and colleagues in your industry, like the people who are adjacent to you and understanding who they are and getting to know them intimately, not just as another like interchangeable person on a panel that you are probably going to be on four or five times with over the next 10 years, but as a person so that when the attack comes to their work, you are ready to defend them too. Because this is an all for one, one for all fight, and if we don't treat it that way, we're gonna lose.
Annalee: [00:55:05] I think that's a great answer, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:55:06] I love that.
Annalee: [00:55:07] It's solidarity, but also, like, teaching people not to censor from ground zero. Don't censor yourself. Also, how about not censoring other people too?
Maggie: [00:55:18] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:20] So Maggie, where can people find you on the internet?
Maggie: [00:55:22] Oh gosh. I mean, I guess mostly Bluesky now. That's kind of it.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:28] Yeah, Bluesky. Yeah, I'm @MaggieTokudaHall on Bluesky. I had to take my Instagram private after Scholastic.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:34] Oh.
Maggie: [00:55:35] Oh, I'm on TikTok, but I update like once every three months when I have makeup on for another occasion.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:42] Makes sense. That's a good use of TikTok. Thank you so much, Maggie. It was so wonderful hanging out with you.
Annalee: [00:55:47] Yeah, thanks for coming.
Maggie: [00:55:49] I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for letting me talk about Authors Against Book Bans here.
[00:55:55] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:57] Thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just stumbled upon us somehow, you can find us in all the places that you find podcasts. And if you like our podcast, please leave a review, it helps a lot. Also, you can find us on Mastodon, on Instagram, and we have a Patreon! patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We really appreciate any and all the support you can give us.
[00:56:20] Thanks so much to our heroic and valiant audio producer and engineer Naya Harman. Thanks so much to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music and thanks again to you for listening. If you're a patron, we'll see you in Discord. Otherwise, we'll be back with another episode in two weeks.
[00:56:38] Bye!
Annalee: [00:56:38] Bye!
[00:56:38] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]