AI Summary
5 min readIn 2022, a Texas school principal read the children’s book I Need a New Butt! to his students. The kids, predictably, started saying “butt” too much. Parents complained. The superintendent fired the principal. He sued the district, won a settlement, and everyone—especially the taxpayers and the kids—lost. That story, told by Ryan Holiday on The Daily Stoic, is not an outlier. It is a perfect, absurd illustration of a much older and more serious pattern: books get banned for reasons that have almost nothing to do with what is actually in them.
Holiday’s argument is straightforward and runs through the whole episode. People assume banned books must be violent, pornographic, or genuinely dangerous. That is the impression that censors want you to have. But the historical record shows something else: books are banned because they make someone uncomfortable, challenge a local myth, or simply contain a word that adults find embarrassing. The mechanism is not about protecting readers. It is about control, fragility, and the intellectual hubris of deciding what other people are allowed to think.
The Soviet and the Prison: Two Kinds of Censorship
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of The Daily Stoic
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Host Intro and Wayfair Ad** - The host discusses redecorating his home and transitions into a sponsorship segment for Wayfair.
- 2 (01:39) **Introduction to Book Banning: The Ridiculous Reality** - The host introduces the episode's thesis, arguing that book bans are often based on absurd, illogical reasoning rather than genuine offensiveness.
- 3 (02:14) **"A Calendar of Wisdom" by Leo Tolstoy** - The host discusses how this collection of spiritual wisdom was banned by the Soviets for nearly a century due to its religious content.
- 4 (03:13) **"The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene** - The host explains that this book is banned in the U.S. federal prison system and is a target of shoplifting, precisely because it is a practical guide to understanding power dynamics.
- 5 (04:18) **"Forget the Alamo" by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford** - The host describes how the book, which debunks myths about the Alamo, was effectively censored by the Lieutenant Governor of Texas in 2021.
- 6 (05:14) **"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald** - The host reveals that this classic American novel was challenged in South Carolina and Florida for being "vulgar" and containing "strong language."
- 7 (06:01) **Classic Novels and the Irony of "Fahrenheit 451"** - The host lists other classics like *The Master and Margarita* and *Huckleberry Finn* that have been banned, before zeroing in on the supreme irony of *Fahrenheit 451*.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Got a banned book at home? Send it our way — we need a lot more 👉 Address: 912 Main St. Bastrop, TX 78602
🎥 Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m02lZEbBY9E
📚 Sign up for Ryan’s free monthly reading list newsletter: https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
More from this podcast
The Daily Stoic →