The Associated Press reports on a rising tide of attacks on free speech in America: not the "Twitter shadowbanned my anime alt" kind of thing that MAGA cares about, but the "government banning books and drag" kind of thing that everyone else cares about.
"This year, we're seeing a wave of bills targeting drag performances, where simply being gender nonconforming is enough to trigger the penalty. We're also seeing a wave of bills regulating what can be in public or K-12 school libraries," [FIRE's Joe] Cohn said. "On college campuses, we have been tracking data about attempts to get faculty members punished or even fired for speech or expression and the numbers are startling — it's the highest rate that we've seen in our 20 years of existence."
States banning abortion have also banned vague things like "promoting" abortion, leading to art and literature about abortion being disappeared.
Four documentary video and audio works by artist Lydia Nobles that showed women talking about their own experiences with abortion were also removed. And part of artist Michelle Harney's series of 1920s-era letters written to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger were stricken from the show.
"To be censored like that is shocking and surreal," said Majkut, who designs her art to be educational rather than confrontational. "If the most even-keeled, bipartisan artwork around this topic is censored, then everything is going to be censored."
That thought, along the lines of But I'm non-confrontational and bipartisan, and they censored me?, is such a wonderful illustration of another, immediately adjacent problem.
