Imperfect Paradise: The Huntington Beach library at the center of America’s culture wars

California Love

LAist Studios

Music

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Censorship efforts at libraries nationwide has increased steadily over the last several years. In the 2023 - 24 school year, more than 10,000 book bans were counted in the country’s public schools. These efforts have become a cornerstone of a larger national debate over cultural influences and parents' rights to restrict those influences. LAist Orange County Correspondent Jill Replogle joins us to talk about how censorship efforts are playing out at the Huntington Beach library. We look at how the town’s conservative city council and residents are facing off over the council’s efforts to exert greater control over the library and how the choice to remove a few books from a library shelf can have far-reaching effects.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This week on Imperfect Paradise, we look at how the Huntington Beach Library is at the center of a larger national movement towards censorship.
0:09.6	Listen to Imperfect Paradise wherever you get your podcasts.
0:15.0	Hi, I'm Samin Nasrat, author of Salt Fat, Acid Heat.
0:19.2	I'm doing a special live event co-presented by show and tell and L.A.ist on October 18th
0:24.2	at the United Theater on Broadway.
0:26.1	Get tickets now at laist.com slash events.
0:30.5	This is in Perfect Paradise.
0:32.6	I'm Antonio Zedijito.
0:43.7	1984 by George Orwell, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
0:50.1	These three books are all literary classics. But they all also have something else in common.
0:59.0	All three books, often top banned book lists around the country with reasons like racism or offensive language or sexuality. Censorship at libraries has increased steadily over the last several years.
1:04.0	In the 2023-24 school year, more than 10,000 book bans were counted in public schools nationwide. The efforts to censor books
1:12.6	are not always about the books themselves. It has come to represent something more, like a way
1:17.5	to exert greater political control over culture and the kinds of ideas people are exposed to.
1:24.5	And it's also become a cornerstone of a larger national movement towards censorship.
1:30.6	This is exactly what's playing out in Huntington Beach, a small, conservative California
1:35.8	town where the city council and residents have faced off over the council's push to have
1:40.4	greater control over the kinds of books that library patrons have access to.
1:47.3	Today, on Imperfect Paradise, I'm talking to LAist Orange County correspondent Jill Replicol
1:52.2	about the soft censorship that can have long-term effects on a community, well beyond just one book.
2:03.6	Well, Jill, thanks so much for joining me today on Imperfect Paradise.
2:07.0	Yes, lovely to be here.
	...

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