MAGA Nut Parents: "In 2026, we need to ban offensive books from schools!"
The Truth OC: "Just as soon as y'all stop letting your kids have cell phones."
I was thinking about the new year the other day; sorta pondering what major local political issues will come along and smack us like an oversized eggplant to the gut.
And what I could not get out of my mind was this: Books!
Books, books, books.
Books are the new Jesus Christ for local arch-conservative white Christian nationalistic groups, who believe, deeply, if we can remove gay references and trans references and sexual references from high school texts, we can bring holiness and godliness back into our long, gray scholastic hallways.
It’s funny, if you think about it, because these days fewer kids read books than ever before. Hell, I see this in my journalism class at Chapman University (I’m an adjunct) all the time. Asking young folks to invest their time and energy into, oh, a 200-page opus is like asking them to identify two members of the New Kids on the Block or change a tire (both equally lost arts). So, when I hear people like Sonja Shaw or Amber (Why Don’t the Cool Girls Like Me?) Smith or Judy (Droppin’ N Bombs like Biggie) Bullockus or Lisa Davis or Jennifer Adnams or Chad Williams fight to reduce scholastic access to books, I chuckle aloud. It is, truly, a battle straight out of the early 1980s, when a then-Ronald Reagan-worshiping Orange County was overflowing with church-directed morality sweeps of our texts. And while, looking back, I believe those efforts were painfully misguided, at least kids were actually taking books out from libraries.
Wait. I digress.
As we enter 2026, I suggest we adopt a new confrontational approach to these morons, and it boils down to a simple, singular question: “Do your teens have cell phones?”
Pause.
“Do they?”
Pause.
“Seriously, do they?”
Awkward pause.
“Because if they do, you need to shut up. You’re literally giving them access to the biggest pornographic database the world has ever seen. You’re giving them access to big dicks and small dicks and big tits and small tits and vaginas and anal or oral and bondage. You’re letting them see doctored nude photos of every celebrity who has ever walked the earth. You’re letting them visit Porn Hub and Porn Hat and Porn 300 and Porn One. You’re letting them serve Mistress Big Boobs and pay Guardian Cock Grow and … and … and …
Pause.
“Do your teens have cell phones?”
It’s a simple question, but also a game changer. For if you are in favor of banning certain books because they are too pornographic or risqué, but you hand your child an iPhone, you are 100 percent full of performative bullshit. You want to fight so you can show off your fight, but deep down you’re a modern-day hypocrite uninterested in the root of our kids’ issues and ignorant to the true breadth of their accesses.
I assure you, the vast majority of teens checking out sexually explicit material aren’t doing so via a book.
They’re doing so via the devices their parents eagerly purchase for them.
Even the MAGA ones.
I grew up a poor kid. There’s no way that I would’ve been able to have a cell phone growing up. Even though my friends at school — who were on the good side of the tracks had computers — we could not afford one. The library was my everything. Honestly, I think two things are to blame here: 1. A need to control anything that’s out there that might enlighten the public and keep the narrative MAGA focused; 2. keep the poor ignorant — that’s how they get their base — by convincing the poor that the other is to blame in a bait and switch covering up that it’s really the rich conservatives they should be focusing their ire on.
Book banning has little—if anything—to do with so-called “pornographic content.” It is far more about restricting critical thinking and controlling narratives.
Content regulation is already bounded by the First Amendment, and it is not the role of a few parents to censor material for everyone else’s children. If parents feel compelled, they are fully free—and responsible—to monitor what their own children read, without imposing those limits on others.