Groff, explaining her decision to open a bookstore selling banned books in Florida, was more emphatic: “In the places where people burn books, they will one day burn people.” Indeed, the bans are of a piece with a broad right-wing agenda that seeks to restrict civil liberties across the board.
Ingram identified book bans as part of a wider war on public schooling and low-income families. Groff connected them to the rollback of reproductive rights in red states since the Dobbs decision. “People in Florida do not have control over our own autonomy in Florida right now,” she said. “This is happening under the cloak of a lot of the book banning stuff.”
Book bans, like abortion bans and the gutting of the social service net, are unpopular, the repressive last gasps of a minority that has given up on persuasion. According to Picoult, 11 people are responsible for more than half of the country’s book bans. (In Martin County, Florida, a single disgruntled parent was behind the banning of 92 books, 20 of which were written by Picoult.)
