Over the past several years, there have been considerable furor, claims, and counter-claims over political statements by prominent candidates that have in fact been proven not to be accurate in the slightest. Those statements are usually justified under the general concept of “freedom of speech.”

As many have said, and I’m among them, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts, meaning that you shouldn’t be allowed to present false or untrue facts, at least not publicly. Yet politicians, especially those such as Donald Trump, repeatedly reiterated proven untruths.

Despite assertions that all speech should be free, the Supreme Court and other courts have held that certain forms of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. In general terms, there are nine categories of unprotected speech: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes. So it’s legally clear that not all forms of speech are protected.

So far, at least, under current law and legal precedents, politicians and those running for office cannot be prosecuted for statements that are untrue or misleading.

What I find both interesting and appalling is that while various state and federal laws prohibit false or misleading advertising about products, there’s no restriction on untrue or misleading statements by politicians.

What the Supreme Court either ignored or dismissed in the Citizens United decision is that political speech conveyed by any media, whether print or electronic, is not just speech, but an advertisement for what is actually a commodity – the services which a politician or would-be politician promises to undertake for his or her constituents if elected.

When someone expresses an opinion or even wrong or false facts in conversation, they aren’t selling a product, but when they do it in public arenas and/or through the media in pursuit of a political goal, they’re trying to sell a commodity… and the claims for that commodity should be regulated and legally penalized for blatant falsehoods, just as corporate advertising is, at least theoretically.

From what I’ve read lately, the Republican Party is now proposing the very thing that it finds objectionable in certain segments of the Democratic Party – censorship by the extreme minority.

Now, what the GOP has proposed doesn’t sound like that, at first glance, because the proposal is to make every bit of every teachers’ curriculum publicly available, apparently online. It sounds so eminently reasonable, and it feeds into another Republican line of attack that surfaced in the last election – the idea that parents should control what their children are taught.

Part of this belief comes from the idea that, if we’ve been to school, we know what should be taught and how. If we’ve played a sport, we know as much as the professional coach, etc. But the plain fact is that most people don’t know as much as the teacher does about the subject being taught, nor do they know as much as the professional coach. They’re entitled to their opinions, but, unless they have equivalent professional experience, their views shouldn’t override the professionals in professional matters.

Years ago, some family members were discussing music with my wife the professor, who’s sung opera and art song internationally and taught and directed opera at the university level for over fifty years. They asked some questions about her views of the comparative excellence of various works, then decided that their beliefs were superior to hers, despite the fact that none of them, despite their advanced degrees in other fields, had any academic training or professional experience in music. But they were still quietly totally convinced of their “expertise,” as are too many parents who have little to rely on but their own personal experience.

Then there are the practical downsides to this latest Republican proposal, one that might as well be termed “educational populism.”

To begin with, such a proposal will add an enormous workload to teachers, many of whom are already burning out and leaving the field. And given that most teachers and curricula are already heavily scrutinized, generally the only parents who will peruse such data are those who already object, which, in effect, becomes a form of censorship by the minority.

If something like this becomes law, wherever it does the result will be to further dumb down the curriculum, because the teachers who need to keep their jobs will avoid controversy at all costs and more of the teachers who are trying to get children to think for themselves will leave or be driven out.

But the Republicans are politically astute in capitalizing on the innate belief that parents know more about what their children should be taught than the teachers do. And this “astuteness” is likely to result in even greater damage to public education in the United States.

Over the past year, banning books in U.S. libraries, both public and school, has reached an all-time high. Now, to be frank, trying to ban books in the United States has a long and odious history that dates back to the arrival of the first “colonists,” or if we’re being perfectly truthful, the first European invaders, but, all too often, truth is one of the reasons why people want to ban books, because, if it’s not their truth, or it contradicts or shows flaws in their truth, they don’t want a contrary truth out there, especially where their children might encounter it.

The books banned somewhere in the United States are too numerous even to list them all, but among those banned are titles that are classics of one sort or another: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Rings, The Jungle, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Slaughterhouse Five, Gone with the Wind, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Catch-22, Of Mice and Men, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Beloved, Ulysses [James Joyce], The Color Purple, The Grapes of Wrath [also an older book, released in 1939 by Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck], The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man [Ralph Ellison], Song of Solomon [Toni Morrison, another Nobel Prize winner], and Native Son [Richard Wright]

The vast majority of books being banned currently deal with race or racial identity, gender issues, and systemic injustice, and the majority of the current bans are by schools and public libraries.

In 2020, the latest year for which statistics have been compiled, the most challenged book was George, a novel about the life of a transgender fourth grader. The other nine books that made the 2020 top 10 banned list were Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You; All American Boys; Speak; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice; To Kill a Mockingbird [some 60 years after it was first published]; Of Mice and Men; The Bluest Eye [Toni Morrison]; and The Hate U Give.

The latest high profile attack by the book banners is Maus, a serialized comic book published as a graphic novel in 1992 [and the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize] by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who channeled his Polish-Jewish, Holocaust-surviving parents’ experiences into the semi-autobiographical masterpiece in which Jews are represented as mice and Germans as cats.

From what I can see, the book banners all share one common trait – they want to decide what published work they, their friends, and their children can even see on the bookshelves, and they’re angry and afraid that views contrary to their own will pollute or contaminate people, or heaven forbid, make them think and change their views. In short, the book banners want control.

And that kind of control is antithetical to the First Amendment, pure and simple.

If a parent can’t instill basic human values in his, her, or their children before they start really reading, banning books isn’t going to help. In fact, banning a book might even spur greater interest in the banned book. Apparently, after the attack on Maus, the book moved back onto the bestseller list.

What book banners all have in common is a dislike of something depicted in the book they wish banned, and these dislikes spring from both ends of the political spectrum, and rarely from those with more moderate views.

Like all true believers, the book banners are firmly convinced that they, and only they, should control the books their children and others in their community can even see on the library shelves or be taught in school, regardless of whether they’re literary classics or present an accurate depiction of events or beliefs that have created harm to others.

But then, while there just might be a connection between people who don’t want their children to have open minds and those who insist that an honest and fair election was stolen because they didn’t like the results, there are also those at the other end of the political spectrum who also don’t want facts, presentations, and views contrary to their beliefs represented on the shelves.

Censorship is censorship, regardless of political, social, or economic views.

Particularly with regard to COVID, there’s been a huge debate over “freedom.” As I pointed out earlier, a society that is densely populated or one that has densely populated urban areas that make up the majority of its population will, by necessity, need to restrict the freedoms of its citizens, if it doesn’t want its society to drown in chaos, anarchy, and violence.

I’m scarcely the first person to note this. Theodore Roosevelt observed, “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”

The historian Will Durant put it another way, “When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.”

The United States has a unique demographic problem. It contains vast areas of land with extremely low population density, but most of its population [86%, according to the 2020 Census] lives in urban or suburban areas with much denser population. Yet the 14% of the population that lives in non-urban/non-suburban areas occupies 72% of the land area of the U.S.

In Utah, where I live, 82% of the population lives in five counties, which hold only 15% of the land in the state, for a rough population density of roughly 203 people per square mile in those five counties. The population density in the rest of the state averages 8 people per square mile, but many counties have far less dense populations. On average, Daggett County has 1.4 people per square mile. And Utah is a low-density state.

New York City averages 26,403 people per square mile, while San Francisco has 26,403 people per square mile and Los Angeles 8,485 people per square mile. Yet even in states with densely populated cities, there are often large areas with low population densities.

What does this have to do with “freedom’? Damned near everything. People in rural Utah, or rural anywhere, don’t think they need as much government and regulation because not everything they do impacts thousands of people.

But there are two problems with that. First, those people in the more densely populated areas do need such regulation to keep order and maintain a reasonable level of safety. Admittedly, there are urban areas suffering excessive and unnecessary regulation, i.e., California, but some of California’s bigger problems, like the explosion of homelessness, might well be tied to not only the lack of affordable housing, but also to the lack of regulation of where people can live and under what conditions. Perhaps their “freedom” to squat or erect tent cities in public parks and thoroughfares is a bit excessive, but talking about that is has become political suicide.

Second, like it or not, lack of regulation and order in rural areas has adverse impacts not only on those areas, but on everyone, because everything is connected to everything else.

COVID, for example, while often late in coming, still hit rural counties and almost always had a more devastating effect because those counties don’t usually have strong health care infrastructure. In addition, most of those who have died disproportionately of COVID in rural counties were people who didn’t get vaccinated, largely because they didn’t want the federal government infringing on their freedoms. But now they’re demanding far more federal and state health care and support than they’re paying for.

While rural counties tend to be conservative and anti-government, they also benefit disproportionately from a wide range of federal government programs, even while their inhabitants complain about the government that provides those services. Counties like Daggett County would have difficulty even maintaining roads without financial aid from the state and federal government.

The other associated problem is that too often under-regulated companies operating in rural locales not only ruin the local environment, but far more. For example, in 1972, in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, Pittston Coal’s sludge dams collapsed,sending hundreds of millions of gallons of black polluted water down the valley, killing 125, injuring 1,100, destroying 16 communities, 1000 homes, and in the end, the company paid little more than a million dollars, despite all that, as well as polluting all the drinking water for years in a large section of West Virginia for years.

PG&E in California has been found legally responsible for massive groundwater pollution, fatal natural gas pipe explosions, and, most lately, for massive wildfires, almost all of which have occurred in rural areas where the company faced less intense regulatory scrutiny.

The bottom line is pretty simple. The less populated areas get a disproportionate share of federal resources, but they don’t want to operate under any laws that they see as unnecessary, even when those laws are for everyone’s benefit. Yet they want the funding from those higher density areas to fund services they want and can’t afford without outside government assistance. What’s worse is that all too many of the local politicians in such areas either don’t know or won’t admit that they receive such subsidies.

The vast majority of fast food restaurants here in Cedar City have gone to drive-by service because they can’t hire enough people. I see “now hiring” signs where I never saw them before. It took almost two months to get my snow blower repaired, partly because of COVID and partly because the power equipment dealership couldn’t find qualified mechanics.

Record numbers of people are quitting their jobs, especially in hospitality, retail, and healthcare. There have been articles in several periodicals lately about people quitting jobs or not wanting to work at “shit jobs.” I have to wonder what world they’re living in. All jobs have shit components – even writing – and historically most jobs haven’t been all that easy. There’s a reason why the term “job” is synonymous with “work.”

People want others to do unpleasant jobs, but there aren’t enough American citizens who want to do the jobs for the wages offered. Yet far too many of those who want the goods and services provided by low-paying jobs don’t want to pay for what it would cost to hire people. Nor do they want to allow immigrants who would do those jobs at current pay rates into the United States.

We have housing shortages and rapidly rising housing prices in the U.S. In nearby St. George, the price of a median-priced home has almost doubled to $500,000 over the last six years, with almost a 30% increase in the past year alone. In all too many cities, Americans with median incomes can’t afford rent, let alone mortgage payments. Yet it gets harder and harder to build a house every year, and harder and harder for builders to find qualified workers.

Students complain about the high cost of college, yet, at the same time, every year, my wife the professor has students who complain about not having enough money, but who don’t do assignments and papers and don’t show up for classes – and end up losing full-tuition scholarships because they flunk out.

Republicans complain about government ignoring the average person, but they continue to elect predominantly politicians who either graduated from expensive elite colleges or who are rich, if not both. And even though the Republicans are against everything except barring immigrants and lowering taxes at a time of massive deficits, their supporters still think they’re good for the working man, especially white males with limited skills and education.

Democrats say they’re for the working people, but they’re having a hard time reaching agreement among themselves because of the so-called progressives who are pushing so many policies with regulations and price tags even most Democrats find excessive. And a likely result is that they’ll get too little done before the mid-term elections and will wonder why they lost seats in Congress.