33
votes
A nationwide LGBTQ+ book ban bill for public schools has been introduced in the US House of Representatives
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- Authors
- Kelly Jensen
- Published
- Feb 26 2026
- Word count
- 685 words
Lest anyone conclude that the private market will route around censorship, I've been saving a couple of doozys:
Leaked Documents Show Meta Cracking Down on Access to Abortion Information
How IHS is Responding to Terrifying Changes at Amazon
I hate everything about this timeline.
The only difference between the private market and the government is that the private market is even less accountable.
Headline omitted the fact the ban is for schools. And horrifyingly, my first thought wasn't about schools, but that it was trying to ban all LGBTQ+ books from everywhere in the US. The fact that was my first thought, that I could so easily believe they'd go that far right off the bat...
I'm so fucking sick and tired of this country's politics.
They probably plan to expand it like that eventually.
I remember reading a long time ago that the plan to get everyone’s fingerprints and DNA into a gov database followed a specific set of steps.
Once you get a toehold, expansion is easier than starting with nothing.
Anyone who travels through U.S. federally regulated airports is incorporated in facial recognition databases. Anyone who traverses toll gates or passes a Flock camera is part of a vehicle license plate tracking database. ISPs are only too eager to assist with cellphone tracking, assuming authorities are too lazy to engage their own cell site simulator.
Private entities have vast databases tracking every advertising beacon and compiling interest profiles that include political affiliation, sexual orientation, credit card purchases, and so on.
And Palantir is there to pull everything together for searching. We're building a surveillance state to rival China's.
The worst part about this is that all of it's so technical people don't have a clue. They can't be outraged about something that's both invisible to them and too complicated for them to understand. I really think we've crossed some technological threshold where most people have given up even trying to follow it. The floodgates are now open and this stuff is rapidly accelerating everywhere.
I distinctly remember 1 and 2 happening. There were stations at grocery stores and malls to get your kid fingerprinted. Here's an ad from 1992.
The Dare program was also mainly an excuse to get cops into schools to get kids to snitch on their parents.
This would also kill GSAs/Pride Clubs and any other LGBTQ extracurricular/student organizations.
So I made another post today about legislation being pushed through state legislatures to add software that monitors 3D Printers to detect gun parts and self report what it prints to the DOJ.
Seeing a nationwide book ban like this makes me think that the framework for how they plan on instigating the kind of monitoring for 3D Printers could just as easily be applied to e-readers to monitor what people are reading. Banning the sale of physical books is straightforward and the framework is already in place, but like even if you found a digital copy online, the same laws being proposed by states for 3D printing could be applied federally for e-reading devices.
And it'd be easier to regulate e-readers in this way since the most popular e-readers are largely dominated by private companies as opposed to 3D Printers which is largely open source.
Also, right now California is also mandating that operating systems create ways to verify age, which includes things like iOS and Android and Linux.
Combining the 3D Printing legislation, the Age Verification legislation, and now the book banning, how long before the government demands that operating systems are required to self report the files contained on them for illegal parts. First it'll be 3D Printable gun files, next it'll be banned books. They're both just data.
Because the legislation against 3D Printed gun parts also says that possessing any digital file related to gun production on 3D printers would be illegal. How long until those same mechanisms get used to ban books too?
I'm not trying to commandeer this topic and I will definitely let others take it from here, but I have some pretty reliable autistic pattern recognition that doesn't usually let me down and ALL my alarm bells are going off right now seeing all these things crop up so fast and so close together and at this particular moment in time.
That's not what the bill does or would be enforced.
Not that it's a particularly good idea, but you don't need in any way to have e-readers report to the government to enforce this law. It would start and end at cutting back federal funding.
It's also just another random throwaway bill that has zero chance of passing the current senate.
Apologies, I should have mentioned that I understood that it's not what's happening in this case and that my comment wasn't specifically in response to this particular bill, but more to the general concept of book banning.
My response was more connecting the concept of federal book bans to the same mechanisms being proposed to monitor 3D printers and age verification on operating systems, and how easily those mechanisms could be extended to banned books by the federal government.
Maybe this legislation is just for elementary schools right now, but once the technology is developed and laws are passed to require monitoring of 3D printer files and require government approved age verification at the operating system level, how long until the next book ban bill will propose to use the same mechanisms that have already been developed and passed?