Debunking the vicious Democrat falsehood that Republicans banned To Kill a Mocking Bird

Among the many lies that Joe Biden told in his 5 A.M video announcing his 2024 reelection bid last week was that Republicans are banning books. As Biden mentions the book ban, there is a depiction of a stack of books at the top of which sits a paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

It is not only Biden; this is also a claim that many Democrats have made when they are confronted with the cancel culture pioneered by the left. They slyly paint a false equivalence by claiming that Republicans are banning books too; often, they make it a point to cite To Kill a Mockingbird as one of the books banned.

So where did this claim originate?

The purported fact-checking website Snopes discovered that an imaginary list of banned books was originally posted by the owner of a Twitter account using the profile name "Freesus Patriot". The parody list included To Kill a Mockingbird and other well-known titles including A Wrinkle in Time, The Giver, Of Mice and Men, The Color Purple, and The Catcher in the Rye.

The user in question claimed that the purpose of his fake list was to mock various schools in Florida that were removing books from shelves in response to political pressure.

Unsurprisingly many Democrats, perhaps purposefully and maliciously, began sharing the list with an aim to amplify the lie. The lies manage to travel around America while the truth was tying its shoelaces.

This lie is now being amplified by the highest political office in the nation.

What is the truth?

AP fact-checked the claim and discovered the following:

A school district in Florida’s Palm Beach County removed To Kill A Mocking Bird [sic] from school libraries earlier this year as part of a review, but the book was added back to the library later.

The Florida Freedom to Read Project which tracks book removals across Florida school districts, said it did not find any other recent bans of the title in Florida schools based on its investigation documentation from the state’s school districts.

Tasslyn Magnusson, an independent researcher who also tracks book banning attempts all across the US, also said she was not aware of any recent bans on To Kill a Mockingbird in Florida school districts.

Bryan Griffin who is spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted that the state has not banned To Kill a Mockingbird; quite the contrary. Florida’s Department of Education has recommended the book for 8th-grade students.

False. The State of Florida has not banned To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, Florida RECOMMENDS the book in 8th grade. (FL Standards linked, page 160). However, the book was banned by a progressive district in California, along with other classics, in 2020).https://t.co/5JQelH8XZK https://t.co/E5qPBQPhsn pic.twitter.com/OAVderItxD — Bryan Griffin (@BryanDGriffin) August 21, 2022

The big lie is that books, even a single book, is banned.

NO books are banned by ANY of these laws and reviews.

Adult Americans can read whatever they want in any state, Red or Blue. Nobody cares, certainly not the law.

The thing is, children cannot, should not have access to adult subjects like sex, pornography or anything that is age restricted.

Do we let 9 year olds drink booze? No, one needs to be 21 to legally purchase alcohol.

How about cigars, cigarettes, vapes, pipe tobacco? Do you want 12 year olds smoking? Same as above.

What about driving? When to teenagers get to legally drive?

How about possessing firearms? You Leftists would ban that in a heartbeat, but right now, they are age restricted without adult supervision, no?

How about voting? Can kids vote? Can kids join the military and die for their country? Buy and smoke pot in legal states? Nope, nope and nope. ALL age restricted.

Stop lying about this people on the Left. You are losing whatever credibility you had/have.

The book and movie have fallen out of favor with the liberals.

They realized what the author meant when Atticus killed the mad dog.

He wasn’t going to tolerate anything that threatened his family.

The liberals don’t like that kind of thinking.

Who cares? Let's stop calling a spade a shovel. TKAMB was written by a woman from a well-to-do Southern Democrat family in an effort to exorcise her White guilt and to curry favor with her liberal peeps, Truman Capote among them.

If you want to pluck at the liberal public's hear strings and profit from the doing, there's no surer way to do it than to have some White crusader rescue a poor, downtrodden black person (or people) from the sinister clutches of an angry mob of White rednecks.

It's a cheap and tawdry literary and theatrical device.

A (very) films (and/or books) that made million$ off White people solving racism:

Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Last King of Scotland
The Zookeper's Wife
Mudbound
Victoria & Abdul
12 Years a Slave
Lincoln
TKAMB
The Blind Side
Free State
Three Billboards
Schindler's List
The Help
12 Angry Men
42
Grand Torino
The Green Mile
The Searchers
Lawrence of Arabia
Blood Diamond
Babel
Karate Kid
The Last Samurai
Woman Walks Ahead
Strange Days
Giant
Stars in my Crown
The Defiant Ones
Radio
Remember the Titans
Enemy Mine
Bad Day at Black Rock
Amistad
Finding Forrester
Corrina, Corrina
In the Heat of the Night

And I'm only getting started, but as a theatrical ploy, there's plenty of White guilt to be assuaged and plenty of White pockets to be picked in the process.

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