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Joe Rogan may be the most popular broadcaster in the English-speaking world right now. Every episode of his podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience" reaches about 11 million people, and some of the episodes get an audience many times that. How many people is that? It's a lot.

For perspective, last night, CNN's highest-rated show had a little over 700,000 viewers total. So Joe Rogan is big, and unlike CNN, he's not especially political. His show covers pretty much everything: comedy, science, nutrition, the paranormal, recreational drug use, exercise, mixed martial arts, music, Hollywood and a huge range of other topics, often with guests you've never heard of.

Rogan is not a reactionary, unlike most people in the media, he doesn't think he already knows everything. He's genuinely curious, and so he lets his guests speak. His longest interview lasted for more than five hours with a standup comedian. When Rogan does talk about politics, it's pretty clear he's not an ideologue. He interviews everybody. Liberals and conservatives, as well as a lot of people like Mike Tyson, who could be either one. And he does it most of the time with respect and self-deprecation.

He's not an expert on politics. He's not pretending to be one. Rogan just asks questions, and he notes the obvious. It's this last quality that makes the people in charge hate and fear Joe Rogan. If you're trying to sell an absurd, obviously untrue idea, it is possible that Joe Rogan is going to call you on it. Not because he's a partisan, he's not. But because he just can't help but notice. That's his secret. A few months ago, Rogan watched the White House press secretary lie about the FDA's approval process for Pfizer's COVID vaccine. So he said something about it. Watch.

ROGAN: Jen Psaki's talking about misinformation online and combating misinformation. She distributed misinformation, because she said that it's approved by the FDA and their gold standard.

JOE ROGAN'S RESPONSE TO CRITICS LEAVES MANY LIBERAL PUNDITS UNSATISFIED

Yeah. What he said was true. Rogan's pretty literal, actually. It's one of the reasons people trust him. And he was right in this case. Jen Psaki was lying to the country, and it wasn't even an especially clever lie. Anyone with internet access could have verified that what Jen Psaki said was a total crock, from the podium, too. But when Joe Rogan points this out, it really stings. A lot of the people listening to him believe him. And the White House took notice. So what happened next? Well, here's Jen Psaki from yesterday calling on Joe Rogan's employer to censor him. Watch.

PSAKI: This disclaimer, it's a positive step, but we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinformation and disinformation, while also uplifting accurate information. But ultimately, you know, our view is, it's a good step, it's a positive step, but there's more that can be done.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

There's more that can be done? Hey, you little fascist, that's a threat. That's exactly what it is. Politicians and their spokes chicks didn't use to talk this way. They were not allowed to talk this way because the First Amendment explicitly prohibits it. You're not allowed to use government power to shut down broadcasters who criticize you. Period. And now that's exactly what they're trying to do.

So far, Joe Rogan's employer, Spotify, hasn't caved to the pressure. Rogan still has a job, but the company is bending. It's deleted more than 20,000 COVID-related podcast episodes made by other Spotify hosts. Spotify claims they "cause harm." How exactly can a podcast cause harm? Spotify didn't explain, because, of course, they couldn't explain.

HOW JOE ROGAN BECAME PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1 TO MEDIA LIBERALS IN THE BATTLE OVER COVID MISINFORMATION

Podcasts don't cause harm, weapons cause harm. Anyone who knows anything about American business right now understood what's actually going on. In a moment like this, it is virtually impossible to run a public company, no matter how hard you try. It's not just in podcasting, it's not just Spotify. It's any company with shareholders; from breakfast cereal manufacturers to tennis shoe retailers. The political pressure is coming at these companies from all sides; from activist investors, from the media, from their own employees. Every day is a brand-new crisis. Imagine the emails between the CEO and the PR department. They never stop. And under those circumstances, it's impossible to think clearly, to stand on principle, or even to consider your own best interests long-term. That's what's going on with Spotify. They probably don't want to censor anybody. They're being pushed to. In their case, pressure to censor Joe Rogan over his views is coming from other content providers on the site, and most of them are D-listers, you should know.

The other day, that annoying fake duchess from L.A. and her brain-dead husband threatened to walk if Spotify refused to muzzle Joe Rogan. "Hundreds of millions of people are affected by the serious harms of rampant mis- and disinformation every day," they yelped through a publicist. But of course, they don't mean that, they're not going anywhere. These two grifters have a $25 million podcast deal with Spotify for essentially no work. So far, we believe they produced just over 30 minutes of content. That means these two have been paid about a million dollars for each minute of talking they've done. That's a good gig. It's too good to leave. But their performance does raise the question, what exactly about Joe Rogan's podcast has caused "serious harm?" We're literal, too. So we scoured his archives to find out. And it turns out, as usual, the opposite is true. Joe Rogan is actually a force for safety in this world. Watch this clip in which he warns the public about the dangers of approaching gorillas in the wild. It turns out, sneaking up on a gorilla, as Joe Rogan pointed out, could lead to actual serious harm.

Spotify announced that it will begin to put a disclaimer at the beginning of Joe Rogans show when he discusses COVID. (Photo by: Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

ROGAN: We're so soft, we think it's okay to look at a wild animal in its eyes, that's how stupid we are. "Hi, hey, we're cool, man, we're from National Geographic Society, we're just going to make sure your baby's okay." Crazy, 800-pound silverback is bursting through the trees. It's right in your face. He's got fangs and only eats vegetables. The fangs are only designed to f--- you up. And you couldn't even imagine what an 800-pound gorilla strength is like because you would think of it as like an 800-pound man, but it would really be more like a 3,000 pound man.

JOE ROGAN BREAKS SILENCE AFTER NEIL YOUNG'S SPOTIFY CONTROVERSY

He's interested in animals, by the way, and he's curious, that's part of the allure. People in the media are paid to be curious, to ask questions, to wonder about other people. None of them do. They just want to lecture you. This guy actually is interested. But no one who is criticizing him seems to know that, doesn't seem like they have actually listened to his show. Neil Young probably never has. Neil Young is an elderly folk singer from the nation of Canada. Young is already pulled his music from Spotify in protest of Rogan's open-mindedness. Does Neil Young actually own his own music? We don't know. But we know that the gesture received widespread applause from the usual morons who then revealed themselves to be even dumber than you thought they were. Variety Magazine, for example, which still exists, informed us that Neil Young stands against Joe Rogan, makes him "a hero" to the younger generations. Right. Because if there's one person kids of today revere, worship like a god, it's 76-year-old Neil Young. They take Neil Young over Joe Rogan any day because young people everywhere are anxious to side with the Biden administration and demand the firing of any podcast or interviews Kamala Harris disagrees with. It's hilarious. They're more out-of-touch than Neil Young is. But at CNN, they've convinced themselves it's all totally true because Joe Rogan is peddling misinformation. Therefore, he must be stopped.

BRIAN STELTER: You think about major newsrooms like CNN that have health departments and deaths and operations that work hard on verified information on COVID-19. And then you have talk show stars like Joe Rogan who just wing it, who make it up as they go along, and because figures like Rogan are trusted by people that don't trust real newsrooms, we have a tension, a problem that's much bigger than Spotify, much bigger than any single platform.

People are trusting Joe Rogan over eunuchs can you imagine? Damn the people. They should be watching CNN. CNN has departments and desks and entire operations designed to verify information and filter out misinformation. And that's why they described Ivermectin, which in Joe Rogan's case was prescribed by a human doctor as "horse de-wormer" and did on like nine different shows. And those same standards led them to suggest, famously, that a passenger jet must have been sucked into a black hole.

Spotify faces recent backlash over Joe Rogan podcast. REUTERS

DON LEMON: What if it was hijacking or terrorism or mechanical failure or pilot error, but what if them was something fully that we don't really understand? A lot of people have been asking about that, about black holes and on and on and on. Also referencing "The Twilight Zone," which is a very similar plot. That's what people are saying. I know it's preposterous, but is it preposterous you think?

We can't get enough. Yes, that clip was from eight years ago, but we watch it every single morning, along with our pilates and sauna just to get ready for the day. And if you want to watch a lot more like that, CNN has just announced you can subscribe to CNN+, and Don Lemon will be on there constantly, for a small extra fee. So that's their answer to Joe Rogan: more nonsense but the lowest-rated dummies in the entire TV business. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, consistently turns out interesting, informative programing just by being curious, just by asking obvious questions. That's all it takes. Care about what other people are saying. Watch the world around you. Take an interest in something beyond yourself. And when he does that, they don't like it. Watch this exchange with Dr. Robert Malone, who is one of the inventors of mRNA technology.

DR. MALONE: The how question of a third of the population basically being hypnotized, and totally wrapped up in whatever Tony Fauci and the mainstream media feeds them, whatever CNN tells them is true. The answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don't make sense. We can't understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.

That was the interview that pushed CNN completely over the edge, not because it was false, but because it was entirely credible. "Hypnotizing the public?" "That's our job", they said. "Mass formation psychosis?" "Yeah, that's us." So of course, they immediately set about encouraging the tech platforms to ban that interview. Dr. Malone, again, one of the inventors of mRNA technology, being used in over a billion doses of vaccine, currently in people's bodies, that's the man who was talking. Credible? Yeah, no one more credible than that. And that's exactly why they hated it. That's exactly what they said you couldn't hear it. Now that same month, it was justthis past December, Rogan spoke to a doctor called Peter McCullough about Ivermectin. Watch

MCCULLOUGH: Sanjay Gupta and the CNN correspondent, there was no fair balance there. He parodied a talking point that our head of the National Allergy and Immunology branch parodied. They said that there was no data for Ivermectin. They said it was a horse de-wormer. Now, either they knew or they should have known the 63 supportive studies and the over 30 randomized trials.

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So those are facts. And if you think they're wrong, tell us how they're wrong. But why shouldn't people hear that? Why shouldn't they be allowed to? Well, because Dr. Peter McCullough, who certainly has the credentials to do it, criticize the people in charge. He mocks CNN for ignoring dozens of clinical trials, making fun of a drug that could have helped a lot of people, possibly saved lives. What do you think of that? Well, that's immoral, of course.

But notice what Joe Rogan didn't do in the face of that information. He didn't call for CNN to be censored because they spread disinformation. He didn't say we have to pull CNN off the air, they're killing people. Because he's not for censorship. You know who is for censorship? Weak people are for censorship. I can't handle what you're throwing at me shut up or else. That's exactly what they're saying. Strong people don't behave that way. Only the weak. Everybody knows that. They can smell it. And the reason Joe Rogan is successful? Because he's not weak. That's the truth.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the February 2, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

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Tucker Carlson: Youre not allowed to use government power to shut down people who criticize you - Fox News

In early December 2021, Palestinians and Arabs representing a diversity of creative, activist and academic practice approached the board of Sydney festival after it was revealed the board had accepted $20,000 funding from the Israeli embassy for the presentation of Sydney Dance Companys realisation of Decadance, a work created by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin of the Batsheva Dance Company of Tel Aviv. The amount gave the embassy star partnership status with Sydney Festival.

We made three requests: divest from the star partnership, end all relations with the State of Israel, and remove any Israeli government emblem from Sydney festivals promotional material.

In arguing our case for divestment, we said Arab and Palestinian communities would not participate in a festival that does business with a state that stands credibly accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to crimes defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In 2021, Human Rights Watch found Israel is committing crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

We made it clear artists and arts organisations fundamental partners in any arts festival felt betrayed by Sydney festival. Finally, we pointed out this partnership denied artists an environment of cultural safety, leaving artists, creatives and companies with no choice but to withdraw.

Our arguments were rejected by the board on the grounds Sydney festival is a non-political organisation. In response, Palestinians and a cross-section of artists, arts organisations and communities publicly called for a boycott of the Sydney festival, inspired and guided by the global Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, founded and led by Palestinian civil society.

The effusive response to the boycott call has been unprecedented, in fact historic. It is being cited as the most effective, creative and impactful campaign targeting complicit Israeli sponsorship of an international arts event in Australia, and indeed one of the most successful in the world.

The backlash to this artist-led cultural boycott has been predictable, indeed recycling arguments used in the 1980s against the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

One criticism in particular exposes how liberalisms conceits of free speech, marketplace of ideas, open debate and dialogue is weaponised against Palestinians to shut down their right to resist and to deny them permission to narrate as renowned Palestinian-American professor Edward Said famously argued in 1984.

According to New South Wales arts minister Ben Franklin, it is the boycott not the actions of Sydney festival which shut down specific creative voices simply on account of their nationality, acting as a kind of censorship.

In an opinion piece published in the Australian, federal arts minister Paul Fletcher described those involved in the boycott as Stalinist censors and Hamas useful idiots. Such contrived hysteria over the boycott stultif[ying] and suppress[ing] artistic and creative excellence, and laughable comparisons with Stalinist Russia, are amusingly desperate claims and demonstrate just how rattled Israels defenders are in the face of incontrovertible daily evidence of that states brutality.

The arguments are embarrassing and spurious. Organisers have repeatedly stated the cultural boycott aims at institutions not individuals, targeting complicity, not identity. There was never any attempt to shut down the actual production of Decadance. The target of the boycott call was Sydney festival as a cultural institution for its refusal to divest from its sponsorship and therefore its complicity with the State of Israel.

That Palestinians and their supporters are being forced to explain and restate the basis and terms of the boycott call, only to be ignored and misrepresented is a form of censorship itself. Whose voices are privileged: those who defend oppression or those resisting it?

Those arguing against the boycott claim boycotts burn rather than build bridges. At the first meeting with the board, artists made the crucial point bridges must be built on ethical and just foundations. A star partnership with the State of Israeli is one way to destroy these foundations and for this reason artists cannot, in good conscience, cross that bridge.

The boards refusal to listen to artists is a form of silencing.

The weaponising of censorship against the boycott is hollow because the ministers conveniently ignore questions of power and privilege. The power dynamics between artists and the board of Sydney festival, between marginalised communities and the monocultural establishment, between individuals and institutions are key critical points of reflection here.

What makes these censorship allegations even more disingenuous is the fact that in the same breath as Palestinians and their allies are accused of being censorious, opposition arts spokesperson, Labors Walt Secord called for legislation to cut off funding to arts organisations that participate in a boycott of Israel. Freedom of expression it seems is only afforded to those in power and with power.

Those who attack cultural boycotts in the name of free speech are invariably missing in action when Palestinians are routinely censored, bullied and cancelled for daring to speak their truth. Certainly they remain silent and indifferent to the violent suppression of Palestinian arts and culture, on the raids, lawfare and intimidation of Palestinian artists and artistic and cultural institutions.

This is precisely why the boycott of Sydney festival has been called and indeed, why it has been so impactful and effective.

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Calling the Sydney festival boycott censorship is a disingenuous attempt by those in power to silence Palestinians - The Guardian

Internet access brings a lot of advantages such as enabling people to gain access to information with just a few taps of their finger. Many people are starting to call access to the internet a basic human right because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up allowing people to earn money as well as educate themselves in a manner that just hadnt been all that possible previously in human history due to technological barriers and limitations.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that a lot of world governments dont really seem to care about that and are trying to block social media access. This can be a really big problem for the world, and a really unfortunate trend that has been noticed is that the level of social media censorship that the world is seeing is on the rise and there is a strong likelihood that it would get a lot worse before it gets any better.

This information comes from SurfShark which has been taking note of social media censorship over the last seven years. This research involved an analysis on the state of internet access and social media in all of the 193 countries that are recognized by the UN, and one thing to note is that this often involves preventing certain information from being spread on social media apart from restricting user access to said social media sites in the first place so this is quite a diverse issue.

The worst offenders when it comes to social media censorship are generally countries that are in Asia and Africa. These countries are somewhat more likely to have authoritarian rulers and dictatorial governmental regimes. Such forms of government give the state leeway to do whatever it would like to do in order to provide or take away internet access as they see fit. Hence, since there are no legal blocks that can prevent governments from censoring social media and blocking access to sites, they often move forward with it without any obstacles.

Another really concerning thing that this data reveals is that there is at least some kind of social media blocking that is occurring in around a third of the countries that exist at present. These blockages often center around things like elections and any type of political upheaval, and there are 71 countries that are either currently blocking some form of social media access or alternatively have done so at some point in the past. Most of these countries are in Asia and Africa, with South America also having a large number of them.

If we were to take a closer look at how these things work, it can be discovered that the vast majority of African countries do not allow unrestricted social media access to their citizens. Sometimes this can be relatively innocuous such as in the case such as Algeria blocking social media access during exam season so that students can focus on their studies. In other cases it can be more serious such as Nigeria completing banning Twitter when the new government came into power.

Asia is also a pretty bad offender in this regard. Perhaps the worst country in the world for social media use is actually China due to the reason that this country has blocked access to virtually all foreign social media platforms. Another example of terrible internet rights violations occurred in India, where the government completely blocked all forms of internet access in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir after passing a controversial new law that suspended this territorys disputed status which caused widespread protests among the residents of that locale.

The fact that so many governments are adamant about banning social media is a strong indication of how powerful a tool it can be. It allows for the rapid dissemination of all kinds of information, and most governments that rely on the iron fist to maintain power would obviously not be all that happy about that and would want to restrict it whenever they can.

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Social Media Censorship is Getting Worse According to This Study - Digital Information World

Ted Nugent has railed against large social-media companies that block users from their platforms.

The outspoken conservative rocker is an ardent supporter of former U.S. president Donald Trump who was famously suspended from his social accounts in January 2021 over public safety concerns in the wake of the Capitol riot.

During his YouTube livestream on Thursday (January 20), Nugent once again upped his unsubstantiated accusations that tech companies are censoring his speech as Facebook and other tech companies have attempted to limit coronavirus vaccine misinformation.

"Boy, does Big Tech crush the First Amendment, like some kind of devil grease gangbangers," Nugent said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

"Hey, Big Tech fact checkers, you're lying scum. And they all have to put up a COVID alert misinformation. No, no, no everything from Big Tech and the media and the government, that's the misinformation.

"When I share [information from physician group] Frontline Doctors and epidemiologists and virologists, experts, lifetime dedicated, professional healthcare specialists, doctors and scientists, when I express their findings, that's not misinformation; that's pertinent information," he continued.

"Big Tech, the media and the government, academia and Hollywood, when they identify stuff coming out of me 'cause I don't have any medical or science hunches; I'm cocky but I'm not that stupid. So I go to the professional healthcare, dedicated Frontline Doctors, and I share truth, logic and medical common sense. And when they identify it as misinformation, that's the misinformation. Okay? So let's be forewarned."

Addressing the fact that he is still able to share his views on most of the major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even YouTube, Ted said: "I can't believe they haven't kicked me off yet. Twitter has kicked off Shemane [Nugent, Ted's wife]. She's like Mother Teresa, Joan Of Arc. She's the greatest, sweetest, harmless woman that ever walked the earth, and she's kicked off Twitter because she said something positive about Donald Trump inconsequential; just a compliment.

"By the way, you know the First Amendment? That was not given to us by the government," Ted added. "That didn't start when they wrote it in the Constitution. Tell me you know that when they wrote down self-evident truth in the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights that those rights and those freedoms didn't begin there; they already existed. We didn't need a man to put it to paper. We got 'em from God, from the Creator. We were born with all those freedoms, all those self-evident-truth rights. We just wrote it in the documents in case we experience some prick like King George Joe Biden who's gonna try to play tyrannical emperor kingpunk. We just want it on paper just to reference those punks that would try to pry it from our soul. But we know we have it when we're born, whether it's on paper or not."

Last May, Nugent said that he beat COVID-19 by following "intelligent, professionally guided care from the Frontline Doctors," referring to the aforementioned group of doctors who made a video in July 2020 calling for the use of hydroxychloroquine to battle the novel coronavirus, despite warnings from public health experts.

In the above-mentioned video, a group of people wearing white lab coats calling themselves "America's Frontline Doctors" staged a press conference in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. and made a number of dubious claims, including that "you don't need masks" to prevent spread of the coronavirus, and that studies showing hydroxychloroquine is ineffective for the treatment of COVID-19 are "fake science" sponsored by "fake pharma companies." According to Politifact, many of the doctors' claims contradicted recommendations from public health organizations and experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci. The video quickly went viral on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube before it was taken down for promoting misinformation.

Last month, Nugent told the Des Moines, Iowa radio station Lazer 103.3 that he beat COVID-19 by "listen[ing] to what the government told me to do and [doing] just the opposite. And whatever the government told me not to do, that's exactly what I did do, and I was cured in about two days."

Nugent, an outspoken conspiracy theorist who has refused to take the vaccine, also once again falsely claimed that public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic violate the Nuremberg code, a set of medical experimentation guidelines set after World War Two, as the vaccine is experimental.

In April, Nugent talked about the darkest days of his battle with COVID-19, saying that he had "never been so scared" in his entire life. The 73-year-old pro-gun activist, who had previously claimed the virus was "not a real pandemic," said: "It was really scary. I didn't think I was gonna make it. I literally couldn't function for about 20 hours, and then they came and they rescued me The six-foot-two, 225-pound headache [this time] was like nothing I have ever experienced. I mean, from my tip of my toes to the top of my hair, I literally was dizzy and weak and struggled to get up to go to the bathroom. And I would lay in the bathtub a couple of times a day with the water as hot as I could take it just to divert."

In the past, Nugent had referred to the virus as a "leftist scam to destroy" Trump. He had also repeated a narrative pushed by conservative media and disputed by health experts that suggests the official death count from the coronavirus is inflated.

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TED NUGENT Rails Against Big Tech Censorship: 'I Can't Believe They Haven't Kicked Me Off Yet' - BLABBERMOUTH.NET

School officials from the Canyons School District changed their book review and selection policy and returned nine titles they removed from the shelves a few months ago. These books were first removed after Utah parents asked school officials in various emails and letters to censor the books because they contained pornographic material. (Andrea Zapata)

Canyons School District school officials returned nine titles to bookshelves after removing them last November because of Utah parents denouncing their pornographic and obscene content.

Utah parents sent several emails and letters to the Canyons School District at the end of 2021, asking them to remove from the shelves some books with content parents claimed were explicit.

We do not want explicit pornographic materials in schools, said Nichole Mason, president of Utah Parents United. Sex does not belong in a public school library, she added, referring to the nine titles parents have targeted for displaying illustrations and content they oppose.

Utah Parents United is one of the groups that led this advocacy mission and was vocal about the schools moral obligation to protect children and remove any harmful material school libraries may have, Mason said.

Utah Parents United has a list of books featuring content they label as pornographic and explicit.

We have been on the news with this, and when we show them the images of these books, they need to blur them out, Mason said. Yet this is what is on our public school library shelves.

In response to the large number of requests and emails Canyons School District received from groups like Utah Parents United, school officials decided to remove the nine most controversial titles from public school library shelves. This action violated the content review policy to which Canyons School District was subject.

There was a feeling that we needed a pause, Canyons School District spokesperson Kirsten Stewart said when asked about why books were pulled off the shelves without following the review process stipulated in their policy.

Librarian associations and First Amendment advocacy groups have been outspoken about the seriousness and illegality of Canyons School Districts actions.

We do believe there is a place for a parent to question what books should be in a library, Utah Library Association Executive Director Mindy Hale said. The problem with these recent attacks and book removals is that they are not following the policies.

Katie Wegner, the Intellectual Freedom Committee co-chair at Utah Library Association, said these actions by the Canyons School District would open the schools to possible civil lawsuits.

One of the groups investigating the situation is the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah.

This action violated the rights of students, said John Mejia, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. It gave us great concern, particularly because a lot of these books were about marginalized and oppressed identities, and its important that students with these identities have access to books that relate to them and put them in a positive light.

According to several librarians from the Utah Library Association, the real motivation of the Utah parents is not to remove obscene content, but to target those books dealing with race and LGBT issues. Many books out of the nine titles removed have queer or people-of-color protagonists such as Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.

Mason said these allegations are completely false.

These books clearly violate Utah state code, as they are pornographic in nature, she said. It doesnt matter what race or sexuality it is: That is irrelevant, as those images are still pornography.

The new Canyons School District policy for the School Library Materials Selection and Review was published on Jan. 4, and as of Jan. 20, the books pulled off the shelves have been returned to libraries.

No action has been taken on any title at the moment, Stewart said. Those books are now back on the shelves and will be reviewed by the new policy by the board of education.

She said the new policy is balanced and provides clarity and transparency in how school officials select and review books.

Upon being informed of the action to return the books to the shelves, Mejia said the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah is still in the process of investigating and reaching out to school officials. However, Mejia said since the situation changed and there is a new policy, We will most likely not sue them because our priority is that they reconsider, and although we need to confirm that, it seems like they have by returning the books.

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Pornography and censorship: Controversial books returned to Utah school libraries' shelves - The Daily Universe - Universe.byu.edu