> It’s honestly terrifying that efforts to ban books and restrict what teachers can teach have made such a big comeback in the US. When I was in school, we always discussed banned books from the perspective of “we used to ban things that made people uncomfortable in the bad old days, but that could never happen in the 21st century”.

Except that's never gone away, and it was always happening, even when you were in school. For an obvious example: try teaching creationism in a public school and see what happens. That's more of a ban than any of these "book bans" anyone's been complaining about. On a more similar note, I don't think school libraries ever carried bodice-rippers or porno mags or all kinds of stuff, and if some librarian decided to try, the local school board would have uncontroversially have done something about it. Furthermore, they probably a lot had stuff that a 2026 liberal would look askance at (say books about owning and using guns).

This "book ban" framing is pure propaganda (dishonesty is common in politics). Communities have always made decisions about what belonged in schools and what didn't. The things that they decided wouldn't be available in school weren't banned, you just needed to get them outside of school (e.g. if you like bodice-rippers or porno mags go get them at the drug store of gas station down the street from the school).