There has been a lot of coverage lately of the decision by a school board in Tennessee to remove a graphic novel called “Maus” from the curriculum.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book tells the story of author Art Spiegelman’s relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor, by depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The school board reportedly objected to eight curse words and nude imagery of a woman, used in the depiction of the author’s mother’s suicide.

Spiegelman told NPR and WBUR’s Here and Now that the board’s decision is “not good for their children, even if they think it is.”…

As criticism of the ban spread across the internet, it appears that many readers rushed to order copies for themselves.

The Complete Maus had been the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon’s online bookstore on Monday morning, moving up from the seventh spot on Friday. The top three bestsellers in the “Literary Graphic Novels” section are The Complete Maus, Maus I and Maus II.

Of course removing the book from the curriculum in one school district doesn’t really mean it has been banned. No one is going door to door to make sure people don’t own the book. Any parent or child who wants a copy can still get one from Amazon, assuming they aren’t sold out. Or they can still get it from a local library assuming it’s not checked out. If a child brings the book to school in his backpack, it won’t be confiscated as contraband. But it’s fair to say that for this one group of kids in one district, Maus has been removed from visibility. It won’t be handed out to kids because of a decision by parents and teachers.

Is it the right decision? That’s open to debate. It’s perfectly reasonable for other parents and other teachers to criticize the decision. If we all agree that the Holocaust is an important lesson for students of a certain age to learn about, then Maus seems like an appropriate way to introduce the subject to younger readers. Removing the book because of curse words and nude imagery seems pretty quaint in an era of YouTube and social media where access to nudity and an endless supply of curse words is literally a click away on every student’s personal phone.

At the same time we’re having this national expression of concern about the actions of one school district in Tennessee, there’s an ongoing effort by rock stars to have Joe Rogan’s podcast pulled from Spotify. I wonder if the people upset about removing Maus from the curriculum and the people upset that Rogan hasn’t been removed from Spotify aren’t often the same people. And if so, doesn’t that seem a bit self-contradictory?

Granted, Joe Rogan isn’t a book, his show is more of an unfiltered series of interviews that cover a range of topics. You might classify it as a very eclectic news magazine. But should it be pulled down because some of the speakers are at odds with the CDC? Isn’t that a bit hypocritical?

Campaigns like Young’s against Rogan — either he goes or I go — are defensible, of course. Nobody should be in a position to tell Young what the proper home for his music is. Nobody should tell you that you have no right to cancel your Spotify account (or cancel your daily newspaper) as an act of protest. But Young’s public and messianic urge to mute a speaker, his attempt to protect other people from speech he deems harmful, cuts against his own career-long devotion to free speech.

Young has long made protest against the status quo his trademark. He decried the Kent State massacre of 1970 (“Ohio”), he condemned racism (“Southern Man”), he celebrated the joy of illegal marijuana (“Homegrown”), and at one misguided point, he erected his own monument to misinformation, the anti-GMO concept album The Monsanto Years(2015). In 2001, after 9/11, he seemed ready to trade civil liberties for the illusion of safety when he backed the passage of the Patriot Act. “Even though we have to protect freedoms, it seems we’re going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time,”Billboard quoted him saying at an award ceremony. What’s unsettling about Young’s current crusade is the one-time free speech warrior has decided to impede another speaker’s access to speak in the marketplace and, by extension, limited your access to hear them. A generation ago, somebody should remind Neil, it was Washington insiders like Tipper Gore and her Parents Music Resource Center who were stifling pop music expression with their Comstockery…

You don’t have to be a fan of Rogan’s 12-year-old show (I’m not) or a Fox viewer (I mainly watch out of professional duty) to view the calls for boycott or de-platforming as attempts to suppress controversy and dissent in favor of samethink. By trying to mute Rogan, Young and his ilk seem to be saying that some ideas — even the stupid ones about vaccines and Covid that Rogan has endorsed — are so powerful that they will displace “good” public health ideas and that Rogan is guilty of inspiring Covid deaths. This, of course, is preposterous. About 85 percent of adult Americans have taken at least one dose of the vaccine, since it became available just a year ago. The idea that Rogan has blood on his hands because he entertains doubts about the vaccine is like blaming certain books in school libraries for convincing kids to have sex, change their gender, take drugs or be racist. Young and the book banners don’t share a lot — his battle is against one speaker — but the spirit of his campaign is uncomfortably close to the banners because both amount to restricting expression in favor of the ideas they prefer.

It’s not the same thing but it’s uncomfortably close. Removing Joe Rogan from Spotify because he let guests say things you think are bad for adults to hear isn’t that different from removing a book from a curriculum because of bad words and nudity you think are bad for kids to see and read. Except that having a school board decide which books are appropriate for kids is at least conceptually defensible even if you think they are wrong in this case. That’s part of what school boards do. Having adults try to stifle voices listened to primarily by other adults does not seem defensible in a free society.

Another thing these two attempts to decide what is acceptable have in common is that neither effort is going to work. Maus is a bestseller because of the actions of one school board. Joe Rogan’s show will probably get more attention and viewers because of this attempt to cancel him. If Neil Young wants to write a song blasting Joe Rogan he’s free to do that and has a big platform to make his views known. But trying silence Rogan with a boycott is not how we keep on rocking in the free world.