- metadata: - source: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-abigail-shrier-db7 - people: [[Matt Taibbi]] > Please support independent journalism by subscribing to Matt Taibbi --- # Meet the Censored: Abigail Shrier - TK News by Matt Taibbi > ## Excerpt > Where is the line between boycott-based activism and corporate censorship? --- [](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce91299-efcf-4f95-a4ae-769ba1518e0e_559x618.png) Abigail Shrier of the _Wall Street Journal_ has been in the middle of two major international news stories in the last year. One involves transgender identity. The other, the subject of this article, is about censorship. The history of campaigns to suppress books pre-Internet America is not littered with successes. Techniques ran the gamut, from school systems pulling _The Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22,_ and Toni Morrisson’s _Song of Solomon,_ to parent-led campaigns against individual schools teaching _The Color Purple,_ to libraries removing _A Clockwork Orange,_ to the U.S. Postal Service declaring _For Whom the Bell Tolls “_[un-mailable](https://www.pjstar.com/article/20120929/NEWS/309299966),” to the [firing](https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/23/archives/idaho-schools-urged-to-ban-best-seller.html) of a teacher who assigned _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_, to dozens of other episodes. Most such efforts failed. The typical narrative involved a local conservative or religious group arrayed against national publishers and distributors, although there were instances of campaigns instigated from the other political direction (e.g. calls to ban or boycott books like _To Kill a Mockingbird_ and _American Psycho_ for offensive portrayals of women and minorities). These efforts however were usually opposed by a consensus of intellectuals in politics, media, and academia, all of whom tended to be institutionally committed to speech rights. The increasingly concentrated nature of digital media, combined with changing attitudes within the intellectual class, has reversed the geography of speech controversies. Campaigns against books now begin at universities, newsrooms, and the offices of companies like Amazon and Google, and have success; anti-censorship campaigns tend to be local and poorly funded, and fail. No book exemplifies these new dynamics more than Shrier’s _Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters._ _This is an excerpt from [today’s subscriber-only post](https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-abigail-shrier). To read the entire post and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year._