We’ve seen a wave of campaigns in school districts and municipalities across the country to ban literary works over the past few years. One instance of this is the subject of MSNBC Films’ “To Be Destroyed,” the latest installment of “The Turning Point” documentary series from Executive Producer Trevor Noah. The feature documentary explores a South Dakota community’s fight against book banning after five books — including one by best-selling author Dave Eggers — were pulled from the shelves. Eggers joins WITHpod to discuss how he views his role as a writer in this era, the efforts to ban books, why and where they’re happening and the reactionary moment that we’re in.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Dave Eggers: I mean, I really think that the overwhelming majority of people in the country just find book bans un-American. They find them horrifying. They know the historical corollaries with societies that they don’t want to be in league with, you know, that they don’t want to be one of these books banning and book burning societies. It’s a very radical act and it’s weirdly bipartisan, I think, that there are some of these issues. But I think that what we saw with the Trump era, it emboldened the most radical, loudest Project 2025 sort of voices. And these things happen throughout history. There’s been sort of eras of increased book banning in you know, every few decades, whether it’s an organized group like Moms for Liberty or whether it’s some demagogue that, you know, riles people up or some small majority of them up. But I do think that there’s a wide swath of reasonability in the middle there that feels like, no matter right or left, this isn’t us.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Before we get to the show today, I wanted to tell you about MSNBC Premium. That’s a special subscription offering on Apple Podcasts. And when you subscribe, you’ll get new episodes of “Why Is This Happening?” and all of MSNBC’s original podcasts, ad-free plus exclusive bonus content every month. You’ll get new episodes of “Morning Joe” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” without ads. And you can subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts right from your phone right now or whatever device you’re listening right now.
We have seen over the last three to four years a wave of campaigns in school districts and municipalities across the country, in red states and blue, to target literary works, books specifically, children’s books, adult books, young adult books, to remove them from school libraries, sometimes to remove them from actual public municipal libraries. To kick them out of curricula to control the information that children of all ages have access to along strict ideological lines. Ideological lines that are hostile towards gay and lesbian trans folks, gender equality, often discussions of American struggles for racial justice in historical context and racial oppression as well. And this sort of kicked off in 2021 was kind of the big year this started. But even though it doesn’t get as much attention, it’s sort of continued underneath the radar. And one instance of this kind of effort is the subject of a really cool documentary that’s produced by MSNBC Films called “To Be Destroyed.” And we’re going to tell the story of what happened in one town, in one school system with a school board, with an author who is an author of one of the books that was cited as inappropriate for young people and taken off the shelves. He’s quite a famous author, Dave Eggers. He’s written a whole bunch of books. He’s really, I think, had a remarkable career, both an incredible fiction writer, but he’s also written nonfiction. He’s also started a publication. He’s also started a publishing house and he’s also started an educational nonprofit. And he’s a public intellectual and an incredibly public minded citizen and also a deeply gifted and introspective writer. His book, “The Circle,” is one of the books we’re going to talk about today. And he also is featured in this documentary produced by MSNBC Films, which will be on MSNBC shortly called “To Be Destroyed.” Dave, it’s great to have you in the program.
Dave Eggers: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: So first, I want to actually start with the book, “The Circle,” which I read when it came out and loved and actually was sort of recently going back to because I’ve been writing about attention in the context of social media. First of all, just tell me about the book.
Dave Eggers: Well, it was surprising to me that this got banned because it’s a book about sort of a tech dystopia. It takes place in a fictional company that’s kind of an amalgam of a lot of the social media and search Internet companies that we know. And it just sort of tracks a young woman who begins at the company thinking it’s utopia and then slowly the walls start closing in and it becomes nightmarish and surveillance based and hopefully terrifying. But what it wasn’t was there are a couple of incredibly awkward sex scenes in the book that are supposed to sort of illuminate how awkward intimacy can be in this era of surveillance and technology. But those were the pages that have been cited when this book has been banned. It’s been now banned six or seven times.
Chris Hayes: When you first heard about the first banning of this book, which maybe wasn’t the subject of this film, I don’t know if it was.
Dave Eggers: It was.
Chris Hayes: It was. Okay. And when you first heard that it had been banned in Rapid City, South Dakota, did you have a moment where you had to, like, go back and try to figure out? Dave Eggers: Yeah, I thought at first it might be sort of banned on the, I don’t know, maybe the people in that school district or whoever was banning it was pro big tech or something. I didn’t remember that there were these awkward sex scenes and they were so brief and so awkward that I couldn’t imagine them being the basis of a ban. So it took me a minute. And then we sort of, you know, tried to get to the bottom of it and where it came from. And this was the first time anything I’ve written has been banned or challenged anywhere. I mean, my memoir, once in a while, somebody will pull it from like a middle school reading list or something. But it hasn’t been nothing public like this. And what made this especially public was it wasn’t just being challenged or banned. All the copies ordered and bought by the district were designated to be destroyed. So instead of selling them back to the bookstore or sending them back to the publisher or anything, they were designated to, I assume, get burned or I don’t know how they would maybe, but they were designated to be destroyed.
Chris Hayes: There is something, speaking of dystopia, I mean, I think we all have a visceral reaction to book burning for obvious reasons, particularly the images we’ve seen of Nazis doing that in the run up to World War II and the Holocaust. But I think, you know, there’s a visceral reaction people have to the destruction of books as, you know, incompatible with society that I think is pretty deep and visceral. I imagine you share it as well.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. I mean, every school board meeting or periodically in this school board and others, they will have a list of sorts of property that, you know, is going to be recycled or sold or given away or, you know, it’s outdated desks or outdated computers and all of those things. At this one particular meeting, we’re saying, you know, we’re going to recycle this. We’re going to donate that. But then these five books, I was among five other books. We were all to be destroyed, to be destroyed, to be destroyed. And those three words, I think, got the attention of the local media, the “Rapid City Journal” in particular, and then soon made national news. Amanda Uhle, the publisher of McSweeney’s, called me one day and said, did you hear about, you know, what happened in Rapid City? And I hadn’t, but it did sort of get picked up in the national media in some ways because of those three words, because usually these book challenges that are sort of, you know, epidemic level across the country, they’re usually pulling a few books from a school library shelf or they are, you know, deciding not to assign a book to a certain class or age group. What they’re rarely doing is burning, destroying, shredding books. And so I think that that was sort of unique, but very aggressive and very intentional word choice.
Chris Hayes: So the publisher McSweeney’s, which is the publisher that you co-founded and are part of and had published your book, she alerted you that this had happened in Rapid City.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. And, you know, we looked into it. And the first thing we did was call the independent bookstore down the street from the school from Central High School. It’s called Mitzi’s. And we said, you know, what if these five books, it’s a senior class that gets to choose from maybe 30 books to choose to read on their own if they’re part of like an advanced literature class. So these are just seniors. And all of these books had been pre-approved by like a very rigorous committee, actually. They’d all been really looked at. This was not capricious. And once school started, these five books were pulled from that reading list and pulled from the shelves and not offered anymore. So we called Mitzi’s, the bookstore, and we said, well, what if any senior that walks into your store, what if we give them all five books for free? And they thought that that was great. And they were on board right away. So immediately, like within days of this ban being announced, all seniors could avail themselves of all five books for free. So hundreds of kids got all of these sets of books, whereas had they not been banned, I think maybe like 10 kids would have read one of these books. But instead, we’ve given away almost 500 sets now. And so the ban had the exact opposite effect. Not only did these books, you know, get checked out more than they would have because all the kids are intrigued and they go to the public library to find out what’s up. They own these books. So there are more banned books than the hands of teenagers of Rapid City than probably anywhere else.
Chris Hayes: I mean, one of the things that’s so striking when I watched the documentary is that this is not, I mean, to state the obvious point, right, there’s no like required Dave Eggers book in second grade. You know, these are like the people who have sort of self-selected into a senior elective that’s like a literature select and then it’s 30 books you can choose from the 30. And the five that got banned were five from this list that were not mandatory, that were optional possibilities that were taken off that list, right?
Dave Eggers: Right. And to the point where one of the principals of one of the schools was so sort of passionate, I guess, about making sure that the book was not seen that he rushed from his office, rushed up the stairs to the school library to pull them off the shelf himself. They had custodial staff rushing into classrooms to get them from the closets where they were being stored. And then all of the banned books were stored in sort of like an undisclosed location run by the district. Nobody knew where they went. And the craziest thing of all and, you know, I wrote about this for “The Washington Post” because I wanted to go deep and to find out how these bans actually work minute to minute. And the striking thing is that there were no complaints about any of these books. And there was not a bunch of parents that said this is inappropriate for my kids. There was not even in this case, a school board that actively did it. This was a ban that was sort of a preemptive ban because the school board had changed four new members that had been supported by far-right wing groups like Family Heritage Alliance had been swept in. And these four new board members, none of whom had kids in the district.
Chris Hayes: That’s the best part. I love it.
Dave Eggers: I know. And the president of the school board, Kate Thomas, has seven kids, seven, none of whom were in the public schools, all of whom were homeschooled. But she, I mean, I think that she supported this ban and was very adamantly pro banning as the issue went on. But these books were pulled from the shelf after this new school board was swept in. And as a preemptive strike because these three principals of the three main high schools did not want any trouble down the road.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I’m glad you got into it because what ends up happening is you go to Rapid City to sort of figure out what’s going on and you wrote about it for “The Washington Post” and the documentary filmmaker for “To Be Destroyed” followed you. But you get into the mechanics, which I think is interesting, because when you take a step back and you think to yourself, wait a second, like was there a parent who that their kid’s assignment came home, their 18-year-old who’s like an old senior elective, and they look it over and they see the circle and they’re like, wait a second. I remember two really awkward —
Dave Eggers: No.
Chris Hayes: I read the circle and I remember they’re doing two really awkward sex scenes like, of course, that’s not what happened. It’s totally implausible that that’s what happened. And of course, it’s not. It’s that basically there’s this sort of right-wing concerted effort to take over school boards starting in 2021 and extending for new members. They need to have some agenda. This is their agenda. How do they come up with the list is the question? Like, where do they get it?
Dave Eggers: Yeah, the list has been cultivated mostly by Moms for Liberty. And that’s sort of the best known book banning organization. And their associates have created a website called booklooks.org. And that sort of lists and itemizes hundreds of books that have objectionable scenes. So you don’t have to read any of them. You go to the site, you see “Diary of Anne Frank.” It will point out the two objectionable passages.
Chris Hayes: Wait, “Diary of Anne Frank?”
Dave Eggers: Oh, yeah. This has been banned all over the country at this point.
Chris Hayes: Did she talk about sex or —
Dave Eggers: Yeah, well she —
Chris Hayes: — fantasies, right? Like her adolescent —
Dave Eggers: — changes in her body.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Eggers: And then she talks about sort of finding a fellow teenage girl attractive —
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s right. Yeah.
Dave Eggers: — in some vague way. And then there’s been a graphic novel version of it that just includes the same words —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: — but graphic novels are so easy to ban, especially among those that don’t read much. And so it’s very easy to look at the pictures and say, oh, I don’t like that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: And what’s really weird about this, and especially in South Dakota, the age of consent is 16 there. So all of these kids are legally allowed to have sex.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: But the school board there doesn’t want them reading about sex.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
Dave Eggers: So it’s so odd. And not only that, but with their parent’s consent, they can be married at 17. So they could read. They can have sex. They can be legally married, which is an institution that often includes sex.
Chris Hayes: Don’t read “The Circle.”
Dave Eggers: But they can’t read about awkward experiences with sex. And then the last thing, you know, when I went out there, we had a sort of town hall where anybody, all stakeholders were invited to speak about the issue. And it was amazing and it appears in the documentary. We invited everybody. So we expected there to be some people saying, I don’t like these books, I don’t think they should be taught, whatever. No such people showed up. There was no opposition. And I’ll say two things. One is that every student that came up to speak, and they were so eloquent and so pissed off and they felt so condescended to. And every student basically got up and said they pull a phone out of their pocket and say, you know, I have access to more than —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Exactly.
Dave Eggers: — these two awkward sex scenes in a book. I have access to everything with this phone. Now, if you’re not going to ban phones, then you’re allowing me to have every bit of lewd information the world has ever created.
Chris Hayes: Including like genuinely horrible stuff.
Dave Eggers: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You know what I mean? Like, truly things with that are completely bereft of like of artistic content or anything that are just like —
Dave Eggers: Right.
Chris Hayes: — the worst possible things that people could produce for each other.
Dave Eggers: So it’s such a strange hill for these groups to be dying on to say, you know what? We’re going to leave the internet alone.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: You know, this vast, immeasurable amount of inappropriate material or whatever. But we’re going to go after these novels like “Maus” and “Catch-22” and “Beloved” and “Perks of Being a Wallflower” and that’s the first thing. And the second thing is neither in Rapid City nor in almost any community where they’re facing book bans and challenges are any of these challenges organic. There was no parent in Rapid City that said, I object. There was not one. Nor did they show up later on and appear and say, I object. At no school board meetings did you find any parents. And it was always overwhelmingly parents, teachers and students being horrified that this was taking place in their town because Rapid City is a very cool town. It looks like a little college town. It’s very enlightened. And the people were mortified to be making national news for such a thing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s interesting as sort of chronicled in the documentary that, you know, look, people have different values and they have different conceptions, genuinely different conceptions of what’s age appropriate. They have different conceptions of what they want their kids to know. And sometimes I think that it can be a little easy, I think, for some folks, liberals to dismiss these battles, because I think underneath them there’s real stuff like the fight over what students are going to learn about the Civil War, both the run up to it, the war and the aftermath is actually a pretty substantive and consequential fight about what the lessons are.
Dave Eggers: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s not fighting over nothing. It’s fighting over something quite real. And it’s also the fact that we live in a pluralistic society in which people really do have different views and different opinions on all this. So, you know, I grew up in New York when there was a big fight over “Heather Has Two Mommies,” which was a book that was in the New York City public school system that the culture warriors were going on about. So I went into it thinking, look, in a pluralistic society, you’re going to have these fights. I know which side of this I’m on, right? I think these books should be in the school. But, you know, there might be some people on the other side of it. And what’s really striking is that, like, there’s not actually really anyone on the other side of it. This is a complete vanguardist thing where they take over the school board. They do this. There’s like a handful of parents who are basically far-right ideological zealots, but don’t necessarily even have kids in the school district. And it’s not some grassroots expression of actual community sentiment. It’s a coup.
Dave Eggers: It’s AstroTurf, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Totally. Yeah.
Dave Eggers: It’s all manufactured. What’s weird is it’s a bipartisan, most Americans overwhelmingly in across party lines agree on the ludicrousness of these book bands, like you don’t find it splitting down the same party lines. And Rapid City, I don’t know how they voted in elections. South Dakota votes red, but in the cities in South Dakota, I’m sure it’s purpler.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: But overwhelmingly, no matter what party, people don’t support bannings of books. If you want to get into the subtleties about when certain books should be assigned, that’s different. I have teenagers. I have opinions about appropriateness at a certain age. That’s something that teachers, administrators, they all have incredibly rigorous processes in every district to go through. And these are experienced educators that have been doing it for decades that say, this book works at this level. It’s been taught for decades. I’ve taught it, you know. So they go through it really carefully especially for the assigned reading. And then when you get into 18-year-olds choosing books to read from a list of 32 books, which was the case in Rapid City, then you’re getting into legal adults. They cannot be restricted by anybody in their reading.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: Constitutionally, you cannot tell them what to read and not to read.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: And what they are getting, though, is guided by great teachers that have also read these books and that they can come to and say, what does this mean and give me this context, and what is this? You know, and so that’s what I think Moms for Liberty and other groups are really scared of, I think.
Chris Hayes: It’s public education. I mean, full stop. Like, right.
Dave Eggers: They don’t understand the transaction, which is when you —
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
Dave Eggers: — you entrust your children to the public education system —
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s right.
Dave Eggers: — you are saying that teachers are highly trained, experienced, creative professionals that should be allowed to do their job. But that is not the agreement that some people and almost all of them don’t send their kids to public schools. They don’t agree to that —
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Dave Eggers: –part, that the teachers are going to have a part in their kid’s education.
Chris Hayes: Well, and in many ways, the film is sort of a beautiful homage to public education, public educators. And, you know, I’ve said this before on the show. You know, I have three kids. They’re all in public school. It’s something that my wife and I feel very strongly about. And I’m also aware of the privilege we have, which is that, you know, there’s lots of public schools in this country that face enormous challenges, are wildly under resourced, you know, and there’s lots of parents who are frustrated with their kid’s public education. So I want to be very clear on that. I will say that one thing that strikes me in almost every interaction I have with the public schools is like just the genuine diligence and like earnest desire to do a good job —
Dave Eggers: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that comes through from teachers. And that doesn’t mean they’re all great, like, you know, people of varying skill levels, but just like they care. They care about your kid. They care about doing a good job. It’s not like they’re not just sitting around collecting a paycheck like they’re there. And one of the things that really comes through in this film in a totally different context than where my kids go to school. In a public school system in Rapid City, South Dakota, is just how diligent and genuine and conscientious and thoughtful and dedicated and smart these teachers, these educators are who really just are there to give kids a good education.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. The teachers that I got to meet and there’s some of them that are featured in the documentary in particular, Jill Westbrook.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. She’s amazing.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. And she’s the teacher that you wish you had. I only came up through public schools all the way through college myself, and I had incredible English teachers all the way through. And Jill is one of those great educators. And she’s not only a great teacher, but she fought tooth and nail against these bans.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Eggers: And she’s still at Central High School where this book ban took place. But another teacher, Jen Mueller, who had been there for decades and another incredible teacher, she left. And you’re having a nationwide teacher shortage and it’s felt most acutely in some of these red states like Texas and Florida, where the governors are making it incredibly difficult for teachers to do their jobs. No wonder that they have these incredible shortages, especially in Florida. But teachers, great teachers in particular, are going to go where they are respected and where they have creative freedom. So Jen Mueller, who was Jill Westbrook’s colleague, they were both advanced English teachers that taught, you know, the most advanced classes. Jen said, huh, you know, I don’t like this atmosphere. I don’t like being questioned all the time. I don’t like being second guessed and micromanaged. I’m going to go to the next school district over, Hill City, where she was offered total creative freedom.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Eggers: So she goes over. Central High loses one of their great and most experienced teachers. The morale of the faculty dips because one of their best has left. And Hill City, this was the greatest thing, it didn’t end up in the documentary, but we interviewed the principal and the superintendent of Hill City. And we’re like, well, you have this controversy going on in Rapid City. Why would you bring one of the teachers who’s at the center of it into your school courting controversy in a way, right? And these two administrators, they both look like football players, like not the guys that would be central casting for being supporters of, you know?
Chris Hayes: Banned books.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. They said, well, we consider ourselves a great school district and we want the best teachers. So whatever that takes, we’re going to get the best teachers for our students. And they knew that Jen was great and they felt incredibly lucky that they had a chance to bring her over to their district. And then they gave her 100% freedom. And I said, well, what if there was a book challenge? They said, we’ve got her back. She would probably not even hear about it because they would fight it before it even reached her. They were like these sorts of tough guys, right? And that’s what you need. Because so often it’s the principals and it’s the superintendents that are letting, that are sort of not sticking up for the teachers at that level. And they’re letting the teachers bear the brunt of this abuse and this lack of support. But if like these administrators in Hill City, they say, this isn’t happening here. We’re not going to put up with that here. Then the teachers feel like they’ve got somebody protecting them, respecting them, and fighting the fight with them, even for them. And I was so moved by these two guys and I thought, huh, that’s how it has to be. Because otherwise, when the principals sort of step aside and let the teachers get the blowback, then they’re not doing their jobs. And what’s so weird, another thing that’s not in the documentary is that the principal of Central High School that let his teachers get this abuse and he was the first one to institute these bans, and he was the one that rushed up to pull these books from the shelves. He’s been let go because he was being sued by another educator at his school for sexual harassment and forcing her to be in a sexual relationship with him. So he’s gone. And isn’t it always the people with maybe not the cleanest resumes that are the ones that are —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Dave Eggers: — instituting or supporting these bans? But that’s just to say, you know, this is one of the toughest times ever to be a teacher and those districts that support their teachers are going to get the best teachers and their kids are going to get the best educations.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: After you heard about the ban book, you went out there, you had this town hall, you partnered with Mitzi’s, the local bookseller to give away the group of the five ban books that also include “Fun Home,” was one of them, right?
Dave Eggers: Yeah. Alison Bechdel’s book is always banned.
Chris Hayes: It’s always banned. And the reason to the point you made earlier about it’s a graphic novel, there are several frames of two women in bed having sex.
Dave Eggers: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And that, you know, you don’t have to read too much. You could just look at it and say, I don’t like this.
Dave Eggers: Right.
Chris Hayes: So, these five books you gave away and then you, you know, you don’t live in Rapid City. Obviously, you went back home. And then there was another school board election, right —
Dave Eggers: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — after this. So it becomes a national controversy. They take it off. The teacher’s kind of resisted and they invite you in. There’s a big town hall. It becomes sort of national controversy. You give away all these books. And then there’s another school board election.
Dave Eggers: Well, there’s been two now. And the one in this past June, Kate Thomas, the school board president, that was most the most radical of all of them was voted out.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Dave Eggers: And also two of the other far-right board members with no real stake in the public schools were voted out, too. So now you have a seven member school board that’s now has a moderate majority, which is which it was before. And what happened was, you know, Trump came there. All the people of the town, right or left, will say that when Trump came to Mount Rushmore, it radicalized a lot of people and it emboldened a lot of people. And then the school board gets swept in, you know, the next year.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Dave Eggers: And the voter turnout for that election was 13 percent.
Chris Hayes: The one where the where the conservatives took over.
Dave Eggers: Yeah, where they came in a slate of four of them. People were not paying attention.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Eggers: And you know, school board elections don’t attract the highest turnout. But if you’re not paying attention, it could happen anywhere because this other group was more motivated. All they did, they spent about 16, maybe $20,000 was all that was really spent to sweep in this new slate. And, you know, all the people of Rapid City wake up one day and they’re like, oh, my God, we should have voted, which is what we all feel when an election gets sort of hijacked by a highly motivated, organized group that spends a little bit of money and can sort of get a radical agenda enacted in cover of night. But because Rapid City is a very reasonable, enlightened place full of good people, once they woke up and said, that’s not us, they swept out all of these radicals. And now it’s back to most of the members of the school board have kids in the district, which I really think should be a law. You cannot be on a school board if you don’t have kids in that district. It makes no sense. And so now they’re back to normalcy and the teachers, the morale has been restored. And, you know, I think that, you know, they and so many communities around the country learn that lesson the hard way, which is that you got to show up for these elections, even if they seem small or inconsequential. And even if you think people are going to vote the right way, you got to show up.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. It’s interesting, you mentioned Trump. Rapid City is right by Mount Rushmore, just in case folks don’t know the geography. You just mentioned Trump, and one of the things that I was thinking through as I’m watching the documentary is there’s some folks there that clearly, I could kind of tell they basically have my politics or liberals and progressives, whatever. But then there was a bunch of people I didn’t know. And what I find inspiring you talking about those board members, like, I don’t know how anyone votes or what their politics are. And someone actually said this, one of the people who was elected to school board talked about actually it was really key that there was no partisan affiliation in the school board meetings. And he says something like, I wish all our elections out here were like that because polarization is so powerful in a place like South Dakota that that is quite Republican. You know, the county that Rapid City is in, which is Pennington County, if I’m not mistaken, you know, it was like 62-35 in 2020 for Donald Trump. So there’s partisan polarization, right? There’s people sort of underneath. Then beneath that one layer down, there’s a civic culture of, you know, valuing education, not wanting to banning books. And, you know, they don’t necessarily correlate. Like there’s people who vote for all sorts of different candidates and all sorts of politics. But there was something to me that was inspiring that if you drilled down past that first level of people’s political identity. Underneath there in a majority of people was sitting a set of shared values about education, pluralism that are good values, values I share and that a majority share, even in a place where the majority of people have different top line politics than I have.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. I mean, I really think that the overwhelming majority of people in the country just find book bans un-American. They find them horrifying. They know the historical corollaries with societies that they don’t want to be in league with, you know, that they don’t want to be one of these books banning and book burning societies. It’s a very radical act. It’s weirdly bipartisan, I think, that there are some of these issues, but I think that, you know, what we saw with the Trump era is just it emboldened the most radical, loudest Project 2025 sort of voices. And these things happen throughout history. There’s been sort of eras of increased book banning in, you know, every few decades, whether it’s an organized group like Moms for Liberty or whether it’s some demagogue that, you know, riles people up or some small majority of them up. But I do think that there’s a wide swath of reasonability in the middle there that feels like no matter right or left, this isn’t us.
Chris Hayes: You’ve tracked some of this. I know this is not the only place where you’ve had a book banned. It’s been banned a few other places, but you’ve also been sort of thinking about this, writing about this. And something you said to me, I should say that I saw you at the premiere of this documentary and we spoke there. My sense of this was that this had really hit a high watermark in 2021. 2021 was, if people just recall, it was sort of post-COVID-ish, right? Coming out of COVID, there was a lot of frustration parents had felt about remote schooling, about the difficulties of schooling during COVID, the difficulties of the various protocols for kids where they were having lunch and whether they were masking and whether after school activities were available. And my read on the politics of that year, and you saw this in the Virginia election particularly where Virginia elected Glenn Youngkin, Republican governor, based on this campaign, was a bunch of sort of opportunistic kind of right-wing groups, like Moms for Liberty. with an agenda to attack public education, to enforce this kind of ideological line, kind of utilize the ambient frustration a lot of people had with the schooling during a pandemic to their own ends to win a bunch of political victories. But that there was a kind of fever breaking after that and things got better after that. But one of the things you noted to me is that the book banning has continued to pace and hasn’t actually gotten better.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. I mean, every year it basically doubles. I think, I mean, this last year —
Chris Hayes: That’s crazy.
Dave Eggers: — Pan America tracked, I think over 4,000 instances of book bans and book challenges, whereas in 2022, it was 2,500. And so it’s doubled in two years. And that’s a lot to do with the organization. You know, they’re fairly well-funded, these groups. And it’s very quick and easy in a lot of communities for them to get out ahead of the reasonable middle. And then again, you have the vast majority of these bans in a handful of states. So, you know, Massachusetts —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: –has like, I think, one, California, one, a lot of states like that. And then you have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands in places like Texas, Florida, South Carolina, where maybe some school districts are more, you know, receptive to it. But you do have these, like, off-the-shelf, easy bans where you can just pick, you can go to one of these websites and just cut and paste the list and map it onto whatever’s being taught at your local high school and say, I object to these 600 books. And so the people of Rapid City did something very smart, which is after all of this nonsense, they instituted a new policy where one person can only challenge one book. And it’s so brilliant.
Chris Hayes: It’s like a challenge in football or like —
Dave Eggers: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know, you only get so many.
Dave Eggers: Yeah. And it’s also like, you know, like online, are you a human or not? You have to prove, you know, as opposed to bots doing it because you will find in a lot of these challenges, you’ll find one person challenging 670 books. This happens again and again. They just cut and paste.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. In Florida, there was an amazing story about after that.
Dave Eggers: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: DeSantis pushed through this bill. It basically made it possible for anyone to challenge any book. You know, the process you talked about, which of course exists. It’s not just school districts are just like, you know, rummaging through boxes of books. Like this is a process.
Dave Eggers: The processes everywhere are so thorough.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yes.
Dave Eggers: You know, in Rapid City, the public library, we met with a bunch of students and the public librarians. And there was a young woman who was one the main librarians there. And I said, well, how many authentic challenges do you have a year after she explained this process where they meet once a month with, you know, all the librarians, other community members about any challenges. And I think she said there was one to two a year since she’s been there of actually somebody, you know, raising an issue. And sometimes these challenges are, like the Bible. People don’t want the Bible in the library because it’s, you know, separation of church and state or whatever.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Eggers: So the challenges are sometimes counterintuitive. But again, the processes are there in every library, in every school district, and they’re ready to go through it in a very thorough and sober way. But the problem is, A, in some cases, they’re subverting these processes and just saying until we sort it out, all the books are banned. And this is what’s happening often in Florida and Texas, which is not constitutional and, you know, that’s been stricken down by the Supreme Court. You can’t just pull the book preemptively if there’s one challenge. It stays on the shelf until it’s deemed unsuitable. But then even with these processes, you just have nobody really doing it. Nobody really authentically saying this shouldn’t be on the shelf, it shouldn’t be in this library, because I think it’s so cuts against the core of who we all are. We just don’t want to be that person. Nobody wants to be that person. And I thought of a really funny thing because I have teenagers and they’re always so embarrassed. No teenagers want their parents to be in the news banning a book in their district, right?
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
Dave Eggers: So one of the hedges against this really happening is the mortification of any teenager that they would say, oh, mom, don’t be that person that’s banning the book so my classmates can’t read it either. You know, and that is one of our greatest tools against this, is the teenagers themselves being horrified by their parents doing this and embarrassing them. The catch is that, again, the parents that are doing this rarely have kids in the district. So, it’s sort of self-selects, right? If you really have kids in that district, you’re not going to be that person.
Chris Hayes: Well, and adjacent to this as well, and this is something, you know, in the same way that I think this sort of ideological vanguard of reactionaries’ kind of took advantage of a lot of ambient frustration with schooling during the pandemic for their own cause. You’re also now seeing this or what began as kind of like, oh, we object to, you know, this sexual content being introduced to schools to a full out attack on public education. You’ve seen this in state after state where it’s a sort of sliding slippery slope from we don’t want masks in schools and we didn’t like remote schooling and the teacher’s unions or whoever was in our way and we’re going to get the kids back in school to we don’t like the woke agenda that’s being pushed down our kids throats to we’re going to pass bills that allow you to take money out of the public school system and pay your kids private school tuition.
Dave Eggers: Right.
Chris Hayes: Which is happening that it’s having a scale that has never happened before in American history, is right now we have the largest scale experiment in essentially a voucher system. Ohio is one such state, I believe Arkansas as well. And money is just flowing directly out of the public school system into the private school system. And, you know, all the data we have on this is it’s not primarily being utilized by people who are poor, disadvantaged, who felt like they were in failing public schools, but rather by people who are sending their kids to private schools or parochial schools anyway and are now just getting a public taxpayer check for it.
Dave Eggers: Yeah, it’s so depressing. And again, you know, the school board being such an example of it. I just wish that people would leave the public schools alone. You know, if you’re not part of that system, I really believe you could send your kid to any kind of school that you want to send them to. But just leave the public schools alone. If you’re not a participant, you don’t believe in the system, you don’t want the Department of Education to, you know, assign certain books, whatever it is, just leave them alone and go your own way. And if you want to send your kid anywhere you want. It’s just the thing that is most aggravating is the Kate Thomas’s of the world. These folks that have eschewed this public school system on purpose, that have chosen to not participate, but then they interfere and they cripple the system and they make it ever more difficult to teach. And, you know, by the way, speaking of federal policies, there’s two bills before Congress, Frederica Wilson sponsored one and Bernie Sanders the other, but they’re parallel that would both set a $60,000 federal minimum on teacher salaries. And I think that we’ve been pushing this through the teacher salary project for a bunch of years and we’ve been just adamant that this would bring more teachers into the profession that right now, and, you know, some of these states where you’re starting at $24,000 and you’re lucky to reach 60 in 10 or 15 years, but it would start at 60 and then progress from there. It might staunch the bleeding a little bit, and it might make young people see this as a viable career path because right now it is becoming less and less appealing every year. The teacher training programs are emptying. You cannot convince, you know, more and more, they have to try to reach abroad to get teachers to come here. And then in some of these rural districts, they are woefully understaffed. Parents coming in to teach, you cannot, because they’ve made it so difficult on so many levels and on top of it, the salaries in so many districts are abysmal. But if you can give these teachers just the freedom and just, you know, a dignified wage, then they think, and I do believe that they’re right, they have the best job in the world if they’re allowed to do it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Your point about, you know, if you don’t like the public school system, you don’t have to be in it for people that have the means. And there are more and more, you know, alternatives. I mean, homeschooling has grown. We did a whole podcast actually about the growth in homeschooling, which has happened for a bunch of interesting reasons. Some of them ideological, not always ideological. You know, the bedrock substantive due process case before the Supreme Court, that is the foundation upon which the line of substantive due processes cases that go all the way through Roe before being overturned, which is Pierce versus the Society of Sisters in 1925 case, is about this time, it’s sort of anti-Catholic animus where Oregon tries to outlaw parochial schools instead every public schools. And the court, I think rightly says, no, that’s an infringement on a form of liberty that even explicitly enunciated in the Constitution is protected.
Dave Eggers: Right.
Chris Hayes: And that’s the nature of pluralism to your point. You know what I mean? Like you can homeschool in our society. You can send your kids to private schools if you don’t like the values of public school, but the folks who are in the public schools should be the ones, you know, figuring out what the public school should look like.
Dave Eggers: Right. And parents and teachers and actual stakeholders, and then get out of their way. When they are not interfered with, things go pretty well, you know, and when they are funded, things go pretty well. I’m sitting across the street from our nonprofit, 826 Valencia, and we work with every kind of school. We have a lot of homeschool kids that come in too and homeschool for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they have learning differences or they are, you know, agoraphobic or so many reasons that are very rational. And we do work, live in a society that I think is beautifully pluralistic in that way. You can choose all kinds of educational paths and you could switch between them. There are so many kids I know that start homeschool, then they go to public school, then they go to an arts charter, then they end up, you know, whatever.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Eggers: Every kid is so different that the parents know them well and know what’s best, how to, you know, give them a happy and rich educational experience. And however that works for you as a parent, then that’s great. But if you’re not a direct participant in the public schools, you should not have a say in the policies that affect public schools.
Chris Hayes: Dave Eggers is the author of a whole bunch of books, including “The Circle,” which was banned in Rapid City. He’s also the founder of McSweeney’s Publication, The Publishing House, 826 Valencia, which is an amazing educational nonprofit and has had a remarkable career that I’ve followed for a long time and admired profoundly and deeply. I think you’ve been a really incredible person and public figure, both in your writing and how you’ve used the notoriety and frame that’s accrued from that writing for good. I really admire you.
Dave Eggers: Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate you’re giving a voice, giving a platform to this issue. And I should thank Arthur Bradford, the director, and Katie Tabor, the producer, too, of this great documentary.
Chris Hayes: Once again, my great thanks to Dave Eggers. That was really a fascinating conversation. I was psyched to actually get to meet him. I’ve admired him for a very long time, and it was great to have a chance to have a conversation with him a few times, once in person here in New York City and for the podcast as well.
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“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.