SF Book Banners Cast ‘Harry Potter’ Off the Shelves – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The Booksmith, a San Francisco shop that features a “Books, Not Bans” campaign on its website, pulled every J.K. Rowling title from its store this week.

Literature lovers can tell you all about the irony in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or Roald Dahl’s “Man from the South.” They rarely show the capacity to spot their own irony.

“In May of 2025, author JK Rowling publicly committed to using her private wealth from the Harry Potter series to develop the ‘JK Rowling Women’s Fund,’ an organization dedicated to removing transgender rights ‘in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces,’” the Haight-Ashbury store posted. “With this announcement, we’ve decided to stop carrying her books. We don’t know exactly what her ‘women’s fund’ will entail, but we know that we aren’t going to be a part of it.”

In other words, the Booksmith’s next-level intolerance stems not from anything within the Harry Potter series, which does not address transgenderism, but from the cause its author supports. Because the author started a women’s group dedicated to preserving the rights of biological women, the bookstore decided to remove the bestselling books of our era (600 million copies and counting) from its shelves. Even in Haight-Ashbury, this seems like bad business.

Unfortunately, the Booksmith’s book ban, as it touts “Books, Not Bans,” although ironic, does not strike as atypical.

The EveryLibrary Institute, for instance, released a report last month purporting to tackle book censorship that instead fixated its non-sequitur criticism on variations of school choice. The Censorship Acceleration: An Analysis of Book Ban Trends After 2020 reads like a MadLibs for mad libs: “directly from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook,” blah, blah, blah, “groups like Moms for Liberty leading the charge,” blah, blah, blah, “Christopher Rufo hijacking the term ‘critical race theory,’” blah, blah, blah.

“Book bans in their current form are a tool used by the political right to destabilize institutions that have historically identified themselves as cornerstones of democracy,” The Censorship Acceleration claims. “Threatened by the power of the people, an organized faction of conservative operatives have weaponized books as a means to a much bigger end.”

This strikes as classic projection. The ideologues behind this report weaponize censorship as a means to extraneous ends, to include such issues as budget cuts to libraries, school voucher programs, and diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), which the group says it plans to permanentize within public libraries through a “‘Libraries for All Act,’ the first civil-rights focused right to read bill that provides new statutory underpinnings for DEI practices in public libraries.”

In ignoring the suppression of conservative books by librarians, ongoing propaganda displays within public libraries, and the wider issue of the de-prioritization of books within the library in favor of video games, puzzles, movies, and other amusements, the EveryLibrary Institute engages in its own censorship. They do this, like the Booksmith, all the while imagining themselves as Guy Montag in the last chapter of Fahrenheit 451. In reality, they took Montag’s journey in reverse: from book conservationist to fireman-censor. It would seem difficult to respect a book burner; to respect a book burner with an ACLU lifetime membership, impossible.

Say what you will about Joseph Goebbels, but the man never posed a civil libertarian.

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