New York Times critic A.O. Scott is concerned about America’s reading crisis. “Across the country,” he wrote in a recent Sunday edition of the Times, “Republican politicians and conservative activists are removing books from classroom and library shelves , ostensibly to protect children from ‘indoctrination’ in supposedly left-wing ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and history.”

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. …

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.