Welcome to the first meeting of the Valshi Band Book Club. I'm Ali Velshi.

Pick a school district in any state, red or blue, and more likely than not, the teachers,

librarians, parents, and administration there have been embroiled in a furious debate over

a book during a Tuesday night school board meeting.

This is not good material.

This is pornographic.

This is indoctrination.

It's sickening.

I'm sure we've got hundreds of people out there that would like to see those books before we burn them.

They're sexually explicit. They're pornographic. They're discussing. I'm disgusted just looking at them.

I want you to start focusing on education and not public health.

What exactly do you think our kids are learning from this book?

The vitriol is not letting up.

The fight over free and fair access to books is only intensifying, and the stakes are getting

higher.

Our friends at Pan America, a non-profit advocating for free expression, recorded

nearly 1,500 instances of books banned in the 2022-2023 school year, the highest since Penn

began tracking book banning more than two decades ago. Overwhelmingly, the books that are

targeted are those by and about minorities

and LGBTQ plus individuals. The rest? Books that grapple with women's bodily autonomy,

including sexual assault and rape, and books that deal with mental health. But those staggering

numbers are not what pushed us to start the

...