Especially since the controversies of 2020, the commanding heights of American culture have been dominated by a kind of left-wing moral panic. In his new book, Adam Szetela analyzes this toxic mentality’s influence on the publishing industry specifically. Many writers are either drafted into ideological crusades—or else become their victims. In this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, Szetela joins James Patterson to discuss his book and the sorry state of American literature.

This Book Is Dangerous! by Adam Szetela
Publishing Prejudices by Theodore Dalrymple

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson. I am contributing editor to Law & Liberty. Our author today is Adam Szetela. He earned his PhD in English in the Department of Literature at Cornell University. Before that, he was a visiting fellow in the Department of History at Harvard University. He’s written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, and other such publications. Today we’re going to be talking about his new book, That Book is Dangerous: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing. It’s from MIT Press. Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Adam Szetela (01:21):

Hey, thanks for having me, James. Appreciate it.

James Patterson (01:24):

So I just want to start off by saying that when I was carrying this book around at my office at the University of Tennessee, it got a lot of attention. People were very excited, and then when I told them about it, it got even more exciting. People were very thrilled to hear that someone had written this book. But before we get started talking about the details of this book, why don’t you give us an outline of what you argue in it?

Adam Szetela (01:49):

Yeah, so basically, so for context, I started noticing kind of in the early 2010s, this period that now hopefully in hindsight we’re referring to as the “Great Awokening” and sort of the birth of cancel culture, however you want to describe it. So there was a lot of attention around that time, rightfully going to universities for example, and sort of how they were shutting down speakers and you had these high profile cases of Charles Murray and Brett Weinstein and all these other folks. But around that time I noticed there was something similar happening in publishing. And every now and then a story would end up at The New York Times or The Washington Post that a book had been canceled before publication, and I don’t use that term metaphorically, I’m talking literally canceled before publication because someone had said it was racist or sexist or transphobic or homophobic.

(02:43):

And then sort of around the George Floyd “Summer of Love,” those cancellations really amped up a lot and I was seeing them more and more. And it was extending from picture books to journalism to scholarship to adult novels to memoirs. Really no corner of literary culture had been untouched by this climate of social media cancel campaigns. So basically I started with the question of if this is what I know about as someone who does not work in publishing, then surely this culture is affecting decisions that are being made behind closed doors. So I spent a few years interviewing people in all corners of publishing. So people who are presidents and vice presidents at the Big Five publishers, places like Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette, et cetera, to editors, to people who work in the marketing departments, to people at indie presses to directors of public library systems. And I even interviewed more than one person who is part of this growing career field of “sensitivity readers,” people being brought into edit manuscripts for potentially insensitive material. And these folks have now edited everything from a children’s picture book to there’s even scholarly journals that hire sensitivity readers now. So the book itself is really in many ways an exposé of this new historical moment in literary culture.

James Patterson (04:15):

The publishing industry, I don’t think, is something a lot of people know much about, but in particular you spend time talking about YA novels or young adult novels. And this is an area of publishing that really started to blow up as a result, I guess, of Harry Potter. So there’s a lot of details about the publication of young adult literature that I don’t know if people necessarily know. What is a “sensitivity reader,” how do they affect what’s published? And most of all, what is this whole concept of the moral panic? How does it play into all of that?

Adam Szetela (04:54):

Yeah, so the way I use moral panic in my book comes out of the sociological tradition called the “sociology of moral panic.” So these are folks who have studied everything from the Salem Witch trials to the hysteria over rock music at the end of the twentieth century. And basically a moral panic is a disproportionate response to a perceived threat. So the folks that I focus on in my book, and these folks in publishing, these folks on social media, who are getting books canceled and whatnot, they’re not people who are just like, “Oh, I think this book is not very good. I think it could be more well written.” These are folks who are associating books with violent crime. There’s someone I quote in my book who is actually head of an imprint who said, “Trayvon Martin might be alive right now if his killer had read better books as a kid.” These are folks who are comparing books to cars without seat belts. And in their minds, they think that the way you’re going to get rid of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and ultimately, people who voted for Trump, is to control publishing and control what people read, especially young people. So children, young adults, and they’re waging this crusade from their perspective to be on the right side of history, and they’re more than willing to get books removed from bookstores and to outright stop the publication of books before they even hit bookstores.

James Patterson (06:29):

Yeah, an element of the sensitivity era in which we use these sensitivity readers, you describe as a kind of reintroduction of race essentialism, and on page 58, a discussion of “racial mysticism.” How is it that these sensitivity readers that are attempting to kind of engage in some kind of filtering or refining of racial representation ends up ironically reproducing the very bias they’re trying to prevent?

Adam Szetela (07:01):

Yeah, it’s a great question. So basically to be a sensitivity reader, you do not go to college to be a sensitivity reader. You don’t complete any sort of course to become a sensitivity reader. All a sensitivity reader is, is someone who shares an identity with a character in a fictional book or the topic of a nonfiction book. So if I’m a black guy, I could be a reader, a sensitivity reader for say a nonfiction book written by a white guy that is in some way, shape or form about black people. I could be a sensitivity reader for a white guy who has a black character in his novel. And it’s premised on this idea that as a black person, I can speak to the needs, interests, values, et cetera of the “black community.” So what the way this sort of manifests in practice, and I try to offer a lot of empirical examples from the sensitivity readers themselves about what they actually do, but in practice, it sort of recreates the idea that people who share these demographic characteristics think the same, that they eat the same, that they have the same views of politics and things like that.

(08:10):

So there’ll be a sensitivity reader who’s like, “Hey, if there’s a black character in your book, I want to know what that character is eating for dinner.” That’s literally one example I quote, and it’s premised on this idea that black people in the US are supposed to be eating certain kinds of foods, talking a certain way, and ultimately the expectations for what they should be eating and how they should be talking actually are sort of the very stereotypes that they’re ostensibly sort of trying to correct in publishing. So an “authentic black meal” would be collard greens, something like that. Now, in reality, and one of the reasons that writers of color who I interviewed for my book who identify as being on the Left find these people so infuriating is because we’re now in a moment where a black novelist trying to get a book published is being told that their book is not “black enough” to be published. And essentially what the publisher means is we need more slang vernacular, we need more collard greens, we need more hip hop, things like that. And so that’s the short answer to your question. And a lot of this is being betrust by certain incentive structures in publishing. So right now, all the publishers are aware of the controversies. They don’t want their book to be called racist or sexist or whatever. So the sensitivity readers have created a market for their services, for their racial expertise and their expertise of these “communities”.

James Patterson (09:40):

There appears to be professional incentives within the industry to get ahead of a lot of the trends. In fact, I use the term “Get ahead” because I was just looking on page 62, probably one of the moments in the book where I had to stand up and walk around, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It said there was a Filipino author who was talking to a white editor and upon the white editor discovering that the Filipino author is not black, he says, “Hey, you’re not black, you’re Filipino. Oh my God, we got to get ahead of this. We got to get ahead of this. You’re going to face a—” and then we’re not allowed to swear on this podcast. And the author, recounting this event to you, says, “The agent is telling me, ‘Hey, we got to swap some races around.’ We need to get a Filipino in this book somehow because so far it’s all black. I mean, there’s some mixed race people, but they’re black.” So what is it on earth is driving this white editor into such a panic that he thinks he’s about to lose his livelihood?

Adam Szetela (10:46):

Yeah. So especially around 2020, there was this emergent but now institutionalized idea that writers should “stay in their lane” when they’re writing. So if you’re a Filipino author, you shouldn’t be writing from the perspective of a black character or what have you. So in that case, this gentleman’s agent thought he himself was black and he turned out to not to be. So he was like, we need to, in his words, “swap some races around and get more people in this book who look like you, because I don’t want to take this to a publisher.” And the publisher realizes the author is not black, because they’re going to see that as potentially becoming the next target of these folks online who will be very quick to go after you if you’re writing outside your own identity.

James Patterson (11:34):

So there’s a particular book that becomes a kind of paradigm case, and this is the book Blood Heir. What is this book and what happens with this book?

Adam Szetela (11:46):

So this one’s wild, but is in many ways just representative of other incidents. So this is early 2019, there was a young adult author named Amélie Wen Zhao. This was her debut book. It from my understanding, got a good advance. It was getting hyped up. It’s a fantasy novel, set in a fantastical world. And in the months leading up to publication, people had started posting screenshots of the book’s description. So not even the book itself. And in the book’s description, they say this is a novel set in a fantastical world where there is slavery, but the slavery is not based off skin color. And people started saying that this was appropriating African American slavery, that this was “whitewashing” slavery. And for someone like myself who doesn’t have cognitive deficiencies, it’s obviously like a preposterous claim at face value, the idea that any book with slavery in it is speaking to African American slavery or taking something from that tradition.

(12:54):

From my understanding, the author was actually writing about sort of indentured servitude back in China, her home country. But anyways, so this reached a crescendo and the publisher, Penguin Random House actually canceled the publication of the book, sent the book to sensitivity readers for editing, and eventually it came out. Now, one of the things that’s most striking about this example is that there was someone, another author who led the charge in this cancellation campaign. He himself also, he was about to have his debut book come out. He’s an author of color as far as I can understand. He is on the far left. And a few months later, the same thing happened to his book. People went after him, said his book was, if I recall correctly, Islamophobic, because he had a villain in his book who was Muslim, and this guy, his book got canceled, it never got published, and he himself is a sensitivity reader. So when I was watching this, I was kind of like, if this guy cannot “get it right,” what hope do the rest of us have? This is a sensitivity reader for Big Five publishers who is heavily active in these cancellation campaigns, and even he himself cannot prevent himself from getting canceled.

James Patterson (14:15):

“Above all,” this is page 105, “above all, moral crusades tend to become more extreme. As they become more extreme, they lose sympathizers.” And you talk about how this was the case for the comic book crusade, and now it’s the case over why literature moving in the same direction, and it’s, like many revolutions, a revolution that is eating itself. But a part of this story about Blood Heir is the rise of social media. One of these social media sites, I think is going to be one that may not be familiar to many listeners to this podcast, maybe some, and that’s Goodreads. What on earth is Goodreads doing to authors, especially in YA?

Adam Szetela (14:55):

Yeah. So Goodreads is a platform where anyone can write a review of a book even if the book has not come out yet. So these folks who are involved in these cancellation campaigns, these are not what I will, for lack of a better word, called normal readers. These are very left-of-center people who spend a lot of time online, so not just on Twitter, not just on Facebook, but a big platform for them is Goodreads. So you’ll come across people on Goodreads who are not authors, who aren’t professional reviewers, but they have hundreds of posts, hundreds of ratings. They sort of see themselves as the de facto gatekeepers of literary culture and sort of the moralness of literary culture. So what happened was they started using this tactic that we call the “Goodreads review bomb.” So the way this works is let’s say you James have a book coming out in a few months, I get wind of it, maybe I get an advanced reading copy, or maybe as in the case of Amélie Wen Zhao, I just read the book description and I don’t like it.

(16:02):

I find it problematic. I can start sharing screenshots, posting on Twitter, things like that. But when you put in a book’s title on Google, Goodreads can be one of the first sites that come up, especially if you’re a new author and you don’t have a huge platform. So what these people realized is that working together, they could totally tank a book’s rating on Goodreads in a way that it won’t recover, and they can post comments that are like, “this book is racist, this book is sexist.” “This book is,” as my own title suggests, “this book is dangerous”. So some of these controversies, ones that eventually get covered in places like Slate in The Washington Post because a book gets canceled or what have you, or an author gets death threats, as was the case with the woman that wrote American Dirt. Some of this stuff just starts on Goodreads with people posting.

James Patterson (16:57):

For the life of me, and I can’t remember if it’s in the book or not, but for the life of me, I cannot think of a single real definitive indication that YA novels cause violence against underrepresented people. It just occurred to me while you were talking, it’s like, well, does this really happen? Do people have a moment they’re thinking of when this happened?

Adam Szetela (17:20):

Yeah, so no, they don’t, short answer to your question. And the relatively little empirical work that has been done on how reading actually shapes people’s opinions and stuff like that, I mean, it’s, it’s a skim field, and basically what they find is, yeah, if you watch, I don’t know, Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth or something as a 13-year-old, then maybe on a survey a week, two weeks later, you might be more liberal in terms of your views on that. But it’s not like people are doing these ten-year long studies about what books you read and how they affect your life and stuff. Now, one of the biggest ironies here is that a lot of the people in the pundit class who have been making that connection between books and the election of Donald Trump or the death of Trayvon Martin, these same people are highly critical of that one-to-one causality in other contexts.

(18:14):

So these are the sort of left-of-center people who will be like, yeah, it’s preposterous that someone’s going to shoot up a school because they played Grand Theft Auto, or it’s preposterous that listening to rock music in the 1980s is going to convert you to a Satanist or something. So they’re aware of, for lack of a better word, the stupidity of those sorts of arguments. But I call them “magic words,” when you’re and start inserting these “magic words” like racism, sexism, a lot of the sort of logical thinking just kind of goes out the window and then all of a sudden you’re connecting a picture book about George Washington’s slave to the death of George Floyd. And these are people who have power. It’s not just a random blogger online, it’s like distinguished professors of English or the presidents of imprints at  Big Five publishers and so on.

James Patterson (19:09):

Yeah, I was always laughing about seeing these tenured faculty that were participating in this. I guess once you’ve gotten tenure, you don’t really have a lot else to do for some cases except to review on Goodreads. I mean, there are better uses of your time. So there’s a lot of people listening to this that might remember Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally getting canceled. But one thing you point out is that aside from these kinds of examples, this specific one, it’s not really conservatives targeted by sensitivity readers or by the Big Five. So conservative authors aren’t the targets. This is a circular firing squad.

Adam Szetela (19:57):

So Big Five publishing houses are Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan are the sort of Big Five. So those are the ones that, for lack of a better word, have a near monopoly on the books that get published, and particularly the books that are profitable. I could of course start my own indie publisher and stuff, but I don’t have the distribution channels of Simon & Schuster. So the reason I focus on those publishers are in the same reason I would focus on the UFC as opposed to some backyard fighting organization if I want to study MMA.

James Patterson (20:33):

Yeah, this is not a video podcast, but is that Connor behind you I see? Is that

Adam Szetela (20:39):

Yeah, yeah, yeah…

James Patterson (20:39):

If we were running a different podcast, we could talk about the UFC because unfortunately that’s something that I follow probably too much.

Adam Szetela (20:49):

Anyway, I followed quite closely. I’m trying to get my hands on some White House tickets for July.

James Patterson (20:55):

Oh, man. Well, maybe they’ll bring Jones back. Although, anyway, no, no, no, we’re not going to do that. That’s not this kind of podcast. There is probably the funniest chapter to read is the chapter on political economy, and in the political economy chapter you talk about, or you open it with this man named Jason Allen who’s at a mansion in Bridgehampton, New York, and Allen is working as a pool repairman for another writer. Why is this story so emblematic of the problems you see with access to resources in publishing and the incentives to keep people of a certain kind of way?

Adam Szetela (21:38):

Yeah, so I will answer that and then I’ll actually go back to your other question about the relative paucity of conservative authors like Ryan T. Anderson. So in terms of this question, yeah, so one thing you’ll notice as I did when I started really studying this zeitgeist is that there’s a borderline fetishistic obsession with identity and making publishing as diverse as possible. And by publishing, I mean who works at the publishers, who works in the agencies, who are the authors being published? So it’s like if 1.5% of the population is, I don’t know, trans African-American women, then we need 1.5%. It gets that granular, but one thing you’ll not see is virtually any attention to the class backgrounds of people who end up working in publishing and the class backgrounds of people who end up getting the big contracts and things like that. So as someone who’s very much interested in that dynamic, that chapter is very critical of the kind of in some ways, hypocrisy of this movement. Because they will look at statistics on say, the number of women of color in publishing or the number of trans people or what have you, but particularly when it comes to race, there’s this idea that if you get more unconscious bias training seminars, if you force your workforce to read Robin DeAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi, then publishing will become this sort of multicultural paradise where you walk down the hallway and there’s five black people and three in it.

(23:21):

But one of the things that explanation fails to grasp is just the material realities of working in publishing. So you could go on LinkedIn right now or Indeed or Glassdoor and just plug in what is a starting salary for an assistant editor at Penguin Random House make, and you’ll see it’s like $51,000, and these are really, really hard-to-get jobs first off. And then two, it’s like, who’s living on $51,000 working in Manhattan? Well, I’ll tell you who. It’s people who have a parental safety net or people who have a trust fund or a wealthy spouse, that sort of thing. And one thing you’ll also notice when you look at who’s working in publishing, who’s working at agencies, these are people who are not being pulled from the local community college. These are people from the same, I dunno, 30, 40 to 50 universities, but really the same top 20 universities.

(24:19):

It’s the Ivys, Chicago, NYU, UC–Berkeley, UCLA, NYU. It is a very, very elite culture and one in which all problems including this problem of diversity, which is on all these people’s minds, are solved with solutions that have nothing to do with say, increasing the amount of working class people, people have working class backgrounds in publishing and that sort of thing. And then the question then becomes following their own logic. So their logic is like if there’s majority of white people in publishing, then it’s going to affect the stories that are being told. If its majority cis people, then it’s going to affect the stories that are being told. Well, then the question is like, well, if its majority highly educated people from selective universities and colleges in the US, then yeah, what kind of books do you think are going to be published and accepted?

(25:18):

And I will say this too, it’s not something I talk about at length in my book, but it’s something I’ve started talking about a bit more since its publication because it kind of relates to some current research I’m doing. The number one demographic of people who work in publishing is actually women. It’s a heavily feminine workforce, depending on what stats you’re looking at, it’s as high as 75 percent of people, and it’s largely white middle to upper class women who live in New York City. So if I’m a man and say, I want to write a book for, I don’t know, high school boys, a population that is historically not big readers, and I’m like, this is my audience. I want to write a cool book that connects to them, get some reading, that can be my audience. But in reality, my audience is the gatekeeper who is a middle to upper class white woman who lives in New York City and probably voted for Hillary Clinton. So if you want an explanation as to why certain books are not being published, that would be according to the Left’s sort of own logic why that is.

James Patterson (26:21):

The line here on page 131 is about sensitivity readers that really raised my eyebrows was “Many sensitivity readers earn more per hour than public school teachers, daycare workers, bus drivers, firefighters, dentists, and doctors. According to one university as of March, 2019, the average pay for a sensitivity reader was $0 to one penny per word. For a work of 60,000 words, you can expect to receive about 300 to $600 at an average reading speed of 250 words a minute. A 60,000 word manuscript will take five hours, four hours to read. This means sensitivity readers make an average of $75 to $150 per hour. If they work 40 hours a week, they can make $156,000 and $312,000 per year.” Are they providing any value that matches this? Are the books any good?

Adam Szetela (27:19):

I mean to give them the most generous reading humanly possible. It’s certainly true that when you look at the long history of literature, particularly American literature, yeah, there are books that have recreated stereotypes and et cetera, et cetera, and there still are cases. I learned this from talking to sensitivity readers where it seems like in certain contexts they can be somewhat helpful. But yeah, I mean I think about their value less in terms of the actual value they provide to literature and more in terms of the optics for the publisher. In many ways, sensitivity readers are now a kind of disaster insurance, and that evidenced quite clearly when you read acknowledgements for books. So now in acknowledgements ten, 20 years ago, you’d see, thank you to my editor, thank you to my agent, thank you to these readers.” Now you start seeing “thank you to the two sensitivity readers for helping me whatever, write about the Asian character in my book” or whatever.

(28:22):

And it’s kind of like this public relations preface of sort of getting ahead of any potential controversy that might ensue, right? Because it’s hard to say, “Hey, Adam, you don’t understand how to write Indian American characters” when I thank three Indian American sensitivity readers in the acknowledgement section of my book, I think that is what’s fueling it in large part because the stuff that I think most people would agree could be better like avoiding certain stereotypes, things like that. That stuff was already getting addressed by editors and by other people because in regards to the question that you brought up with Ryan T. Anderson, mainstream publishing is overwhelmingly left-of-center. It’s not like there’s this huge phalanx of conservatives or sort of far right people who are churning out these genuinely racist books season after season. As Durkheim would say, this is largely a society of saints, and in a society of saints, the saints go after the least saintly, which is why from the outside, this is just progressives going after progressives essentially for not being progressive enough.

James Patterson (29:40):

You provide a copy for the submission of stories to Folio, which is a literary journal published by American University, and it’s what came to mind when you mentioned the overrepresentation of wealthy white women because the description here is, okay, I’ll just say it, and people can make their own conclusions. It says, “If your jam is recreating Grimm’s fairy tales with a badass feminist spin, we want to hear from you. If your love language is recommending stories by Carmen Maria Machado, your taste is up our alley.” It’s an odd mixed metaphor. “If you correspond to how Jordan Peele corners the intersection between horror and racial social commentary, send us your stuff. Folio does not tolerate racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, ableism, or any work that promotes harmful stereotypes and viewpoints.” And as you comment, that Folio is not getting a flood of racist, antisemitic, or otherwise intolerant submissions. So why bother even saying this? And I guess the answer is because of staking a kind of public reputation on the line, right?

Adam Szetela (31:02):

Yeah. I mean there’s few corners of culture that are as hyper left as literary culture, particularly literary culture tied to universities. So these days, if you want to be a writer, you can move to New York City and try to bus tables and sell your first novel. But increasingly, the more common path is you go to a university, you get an English degree, you get an MFA degree, and a lot of those university writing programs have these magazines like the one you quoted. So when they post that, I know I have published in these literary magazines, I have friends who have worked on them, professors I know who run them, there’s no significant contingency of racists and homophobes submitting stuff. So then it becomes a question of like, is this just virtue signaling to the public because we too want to make a statement about how we don’t tolerate racism, sexism, whatever.

(32:00):

Yeah. I mean, that’s probably the case in my opinion. But one of the profound ironies of this is like, and I quote a bunch of submission guidelines in my book, is these people will be like, we’re not going to publish your racist sexist work. We want whatever stories like Jordan Peele and stuff, but then they’ll say, Hey, if your story includes pseudo-sexist language or something like that, you need to preface this with a trigger warning at the front. So I just read that and I read these guidelines where these people, some of them will literally tie their literary magazine that has 400 followers on Twitter to global revolution and stuff like that. And then I read that and I’m just like, dude, you’re literally saying your staff is going to be brought to pieces if a trigger warning is not on the cover of your poem. And then it’s like these same people are talking about overthrowing global capitalism. These are literally the very last people I would want near me if I was interested in concrete political change. There are people who can, unless they’re lying, they’re people who can sort of get broken by the most minimal nudge of something that upsets them.

James Patterson (33:19):

When you start to piece together the book, it actually gets more horrifying because you’re learning now that the stated position you just mentioned justifies the creation of a $300,000 a year position to do race essentialism and YA novels. This is the thing, by the time I finished the book, I got so sad because I think a lot of people, I mean I’m 45, I don’t know how old you are, but a lot of us remember the Scholastic Book Fair, and it was fun. You would go there, you’d maybe buy an eraser, you would get Frog and Toad or something, and now you’re getting sort of left-wing race essentialism for sale. Does it have to be this way? Can there be some billionaire that creates a sixth alternative or are we stuck with this?

Adam Szetela (34:15):

Yeah, it’s a good question. I appreciate the Scholastic Book Fair throwback. I haven’t thought about that.

James Patterson (34:21):

I loved it. I would go there and I would just walk around and take it in. It was my favorite thing ever.

Adam Szetela (34:26):

Yeah, yeah. So money talks and BS walks. I think there’s some publishers, obviously Skyhorse Publishing, Regnery, its imprint, which publishes some of the big hitters on the right, like Ted Cruz, et cetera, et cetera. There are people trying to do that work. Now, do they have the same sort of capital, like a Penguin Random House? No. So I think for me to see actual change, it’s probably going to come from a cultural level in the same way the Left has been very effective at bending culture to its will. At the end of the day, these are for-profit companies. People don’t know it was the Murdoch family that has owned Harper Collins. And these Big Five publishers, they do have their conservative imprints where they publish really profitable books, but for the most part, the people who go into publishing are left of center and that sort of affects the norms.

(35:21):

But at the end of the day, it is bottom line, which is why you see people get fired from these publishers when they’re not meeting their bottom lines. I think it’s the main reason conservative imprints still exist. So if there was something comparable to what the left has done to put pressure on publishers, I could see them responding to that because the ones at the very top do have shareholders and they do have to meet public need and stuff. And I think more importantly, there’s an audience for books that are not pushing this over the top left wing agenda. One of the critiques I make just from an aesthetic position as a reader is these people who have spearheaded this movement, they will say, we need more diversity in publishing. When we need more diversity in publishing, we need to stop teaching Mark Twain.

(36:17):

We need to stop teaching whoever, and instead we need to teach this book, that book and that book. And then you read the descriptions of the books and it’s all more or less the same story. It’s all a story about some character from a marginalized background set in the present who’s valiantly trying to solve some social problem like police brutality or something like that. I quote specific books in my own book and I’m like, I have no problem with those books existing. To every reader their own book. But once you start talking about trying to prevent the publishers from publishing books that deviate from that, once you start talking about getting Huck Finn kicked off the syllabus so that your contemporary social justice YA novel is widely taught, that becomes a problem. In the same way I interviewed a director of a public library system who was like, I have colleagues who will not purchase Christian fiction even though there are people in our library network who would want to read that because it goes against their personal, moral-political beliefs. And at the end of the day, that’s doing a disservice to art to readers. And I think as we’re seeing with the backlash that’s going on against universities, I think there can be a moment where the proverbial chickens come home to roost when people are aware of what’s going on and frustrated with what’s going on.

James Patterson (37:56):

Yeah, we’re getting towards the end, but there is this one thing I wanted to ask about Fight Club. You point out, and American Psycho is another one, these are books written sort of a different period. The funny joke about Fight Club is it was written back when the worst thing a person could imagine would be having a boring job, right? Very pre-2008. But these are books that have taken on a new political valence among very extreme right-wing people. So is this an indication that there may be something about literature? I guess this isn’t YA. I mean, if you’re giving your kid American Psycho, maybe reconsider… But is this a good counterpoint to the criticism you’re leveling?

Adam Szetela (38:44):

Yeah, so I mean, I love Chuck Palahniuk who wrote Fight Club. If you see that severed arm on my bookshelf?

James Patterson:

I do. I do.

Adam Szetela:

That is an arm that he sent me that he signed. It’s a medical replica. He’s awesome.

James Patterson (38:58):

I’m insanely jealous that you have that.

Adam Szetela (38:59):

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you should be. It’s amazing. Yeah, so I mean I’ve interviewed Chuck Palahniuk for another project. I listened to Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast and stuff. Both of those dudes have said that if they were coming up in this moment, their magnum opus would not be published. They got sorta grandfathered into the system where they have proven profitable, they’ve been around for decades, so they’re going to continue to do what they do. But if you were a young novelist and your only goal was to get published, you would not do well by trying to mimic Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis. That said, I think your point about the way these books have been received differently over the years is a really good point, and it’s one that I’m very much on the side of, which is the side of polysomy, which is this idea that there’s always multiple interpretations to a text.

(40:02):

And so when Fight Club first came out, the left loved that book that was around the time of the Seattle antiglobalist protests and things like that. That was very much, I think Marxism had a sort of kick during that moment and they were like, yeah, this is awesome. Fight Club like “Eff American Capitalism, eff the sort of existential crises produced by white collar work.” He was in many ways a hero of the left, especially after the film came out. But now that book is considered alt-right, because I think this is a fair observation, it does sort of glorify what the left calls toxic masculinity, but a more violent kind of masculinity, which I’m kind of a fan of, as you mentioned with the UFC, but now it’s considered that’s bad, Chuck Palahniuk is bad. Same thing with Bret Easton Ellis. When American Psycho came out, that was considered the satire of the hour of Wall Street and excess, and he did get some flack by feminists and things like that, but now he’s considered super far right, et cetera, et cetera.

(41:11):

Same thing. I mean, JK Rowling’s a great example. Her books used to be the primary people going after her book used to be people really on the Christian who are accusing her of converting kids to witches and glorifying Satanism and stuff. Now it’s all about the trans stuff. That’s why people are burning her books now. So the lesson from that is there’s always multiple interpretations to attacks. I could read Fight Club and think it’s super progressive. You could read it and think it’s super conservative. I could get something out of it that’s totally different from you. So why would you try to define a book in one way and then try to enforce your definition of a book through defacto censorship and these other methods that these folks are using to control what we read and what we’re allowed to write.

James Patterson (42:01):

Well, to close, I have one last question, which is on, let’s see here. November 15th, Jack Della Madalena is fighting Islam Makhachev for the welterweight belt. Who do you got?

Adam Szetela (42:17):

I don’t foresee Islam losing to anyone right now.

James Patterson (42:20):

He’s already pretty GOATed. I appreciate the conversation. Sorry, those of you listening who don’t follow the UFC, but I cannot tell you how excited I am for that point. Thank you very much, Adam Szetela for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Adam Szetela:

Yeah, thank you man. I appreciate it.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.