Normally I don’t pay much attention to Banned Books Week. In past years it seems the scariest scenarios anyone reported were things like someone claiming a book shouldn’t be on library shelves for fourth-graders. I’ve called it “Bland Books Week.” This year is different, though. A movement has arisen from the sewers of the religious right to intimidate and harass librarians. “Woke” leftists and Muslim fanatics also pose threats. People at my local library have been worried, even though little has happened around here.

Here are some incidents that have made the news.

On August 12, Salman Rushdie was assaulted and severely injured in public. There’s reason to think this is related to the hit which Ayatollah Khomeini ordered on Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.

In Bonners Ferry, Idaho, the Boundary County library director has resigned. She said that “nothing in my background could have prepared me for the political atmosphere of extremism, militant Christian fundamentalism, intimidation tactics, and threatening behavior currently being employed in the community.” An activist group had presented a list of 400 titles to be banned from the library, including some it doesn’t currently hold.

Amazon, as a private business, can carry or refuse whatever books it chooses, but it’s worrisome if ideological grounds dictate its choices. In June 2022, some Amazon employees held a “die-in” to protest the company’s selling “anti-trans” books. One of the books they wanted readers protected from was a children’s book called “Johnny the Walrus,” which is still available on Amazon. In a delicious irony, these would-be book banners call themselves “No Hate at Amazon.”

In 2021, Amazon removed a book called When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement. The basis of this, according to Amazon, is a policy “not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” The ban predates the protest, so it isn’t clear if there’s any relationship between the two.

Some would-be banners have resorted to fabricated accusations as a tool of intimidation. Governor Abbott of Texas has declared two popular books illegal in schools. He claimed that Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado are “pornographic” and illegal to make available to anyone under 18. This would make private schools as well as public ones subject to prosecution.

For those who want to check for themselves, here’s a page (NSFW!) with some sample pages from Gender Queer. It’s definitely disturbing stuff, so click through at your own risk, but I don’t think it’s pornographic by any current legal standard in the US. It’s amusing that this page was put up by self-described “pro-family” people wanting to show how bad the book is, so they’ve made their own website “pornographic.”

Anyone who’s read the Bible carefully knows it has a lot of bloody and sexually disturbing passages, but it isn’t often targeted in the US. However, a school district in Texas removed the Bible and about 40 other books from all public school libraries and classrooms. The reason isn’t clear. Gender Queer is on this list, too.

Sometimes the ban attempts go meta. A Massachusetts politician, Rayla Campbell, was the target of a bogus police report claiming she was holding a book that contained child pornography. The book was — yes, again — Gender Queer. A cop looked at the book and decided there was no pornography in it, even though Campbell herself insisted that there was. Campbell is the 2022 Republican nominee for Secretary of State in Massachusetts.

In February 2022, there was a good old-fashioned book burning was held in Tennessee. The books included ones from the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, has said about the ban attempts, “What is novel for people to understand is that this is being organized and perpetrated at a level we’ve not seen before.”

I could keep going, turning up endless examples of attempts to ban books in the United States. It’s the worst it’s been in years.