Republican Governor Ron DeSantis likes to refer to his state as “the free state of Florida.”  

But for those who cherish the right to read whatever they want, Florida’s legislative agenda offers anything but freedom.  

Among those books pulled from public libraries—temporarily or permanently—are John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” Colleen Hoover’s “Hopeless,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Grace Lin’s picture story “Dim Sum for Everyone!” 

Florida’s Martin County school district removed dozens of books from its middle schools and high schools. Among these: Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved,” James Patterson’s “Maximum Ride” thrillers, and numerous novels by Jodi Picoult. 

Ron DeSantis

Bill O’Reilly, the former Fox News host, staunchly supported Florida’s book ban laws enacted by DeSantis. Then two of his own books—Killing Jesus and Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency—were temporarily removed from the Escambia County School District.

Suddenly, O’Reilly changed his mind. 

“It’s absurd. Preposterous,” O’Reilly told Newsweek. He threatened to “find out exactly who made the decisions … [and] put their pictures on television and on my website … and I’m going to ask them for a detailed explanation of why they did that. 

“When DeSantis signed the book law, I supported the theme because there was abuse going on in Florida. There were far-left progressive people trying to impose an agenda on children, there’s no doubt about it.” 

So O’Reilly believes it’s OK to censor books promoting a “far-left progressive” view. Censorship is wrong only when it condemns his books to oblivion. 

Bill O’Reilly

Bill O’Reilly at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.jpg: World Affairs Council of Philadelphiaderivative work: Karppinen, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Under Florida’s HB 1069 bill, affected titles include dictionaries, The Autobiography of Malcolm X,  and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.

A partial list of the 1,600 books banned in Escambia County, Florida, includes:  

• The Guinness Book of World Records
• Ripley’s Believe It or Not
• Biographies of Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Thurgood Marshall
• The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus
• Titans and Olympians: Greek and Roman Myths
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• The Martian Chronicles
• Van Gough and Gauguin: The Studio of the South
• Invisible Man
• As I Lay Dying
• Light in August
• The Reivers
• The Sound and the Fury
• Tender Is the Night
• Lord of the Flies
• I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

• Catch-22
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Heretics of Dune
• Brave New World
• Ulysses
• Dubliner
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Carrie
• Pet Sematary
• Daniel Boone
• Babbitt
• Doctor Zhivago
• Coping with Date Rape and Acquaintance Rape
• Super Human Encyclopedia: Discover the Amazing Things Your Body Can Do
• HIV infection: The Facts You Need to Know 
• King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
• Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America 
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• The Fountainhead 

Nazi book burning 

• The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison 
• Black Like Me
• Atlas Shrugged 
• Flowers for Algernon 
• James Dean: Rebel Life 
• The Silence of the Lambs
• Slaughterhouse Five 
• The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood
• Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters 
• Paul McCartney: The Life
• Augustus Caesar
• Dracula  
• Coping As a Survivor of Violent Crime 
• Schindler’s List
• Date Rape 
• France: A History in Art 
• The AIDS Epidemic: Disaster & Survival
• Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood 

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 
• Tupac Shakur
• Hernan Cortes
• Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters
• Native Son
• The Clear and Simple Thesaurus Dictionary 
• Illustrated Who’s Who in Mythology
• Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America
• STDs
• Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary
• Encyclopedia of World Costume
• The Winds of War
• Early Humans
• Child Abuse
• The Bible Book 
• Les Misérables

All of which means: If you want to read something forbidden by the State and can’t meet the high prices of bookstores, you’re not going to read it.

At least, not in Florida.

In 1969, the Young Rascals sang:

All the world over, so easy to see
People everywhere just wanna be free

but this ignores a grim and fundamental truth: Many people don’t want to be free.

Psychoanalyst  Erich Fromm noted this in his 1941 bestseller, Escape From Freedom.

Its thesis: People who can’t accept the dangers and responsibilities that come with freedom will probably turn to authoritarianism.

Democracy has freed many people, but it also makes others feel alienated and dehumanized. Many Germans turned to Nazism for a sense of belonging and purpose.

Many people hold a twisted concept of what accounts for freedom. They accuse their enemies of being tyrants, while fiercely supporting a dictatorship of their own. A favorite marching song of Hitler’s SS went:

Clear the streets, the SS marches!
They will take the road from tyranny to freedom!

Such people fervently believe that they are being persecuted if they aren’t allowed to persecute those they hate.

Thus, during the Presidency of Barack Obama, millions of Republicans believed themselves victims because they weren’t allowed  to

(1)  discriminate  on  the  basis of  race  or sex; and

(2) deny medical care to millions of poor and middle-class Americans. 

The same holds true for the followers of Ron DeSantis.