America’s Read Guards

The book opens with the case that remains the era’s most instructive. In 2019 Amélie Wen Zhao, a young Chinese-American novelist, withdrew her debut fantasy Blood Heir before publication after a Twitter campaign declared it racist for depicting slavery and human trafficking in Cyrilia, a fictional empire inspired by Russia, without making mention of the transatlantic slave trade. The offense, as it went, was that it diminished the enslavement of Africans. In her apology she asked forgiveness for the pain her unpublished novel had caused readers who had not read it. Szetela searched the 1,753 English-language Goodreads reviews of the book and found exactly one written by a self-identified teenager—a reader who defended the novel and mocked the adults panicking on her behalf. Among Zhao’s inquisitors was Kosoko Jackson, a fellow young adult (YA) novelist who works as a sensitivity reader for Big Five publishers; two months later Jackson canceled his own debut, A Place for Wolves, after a viral Goodreads review objected that his novel about the Kosovo War contained an Albanian Muslim villain. The reviewer conceded that the book aimed at moral complexity and ruled that it was too early for complexity. Jackson, who had helped operate the machine, apologized to those his unpublished fiction had hurt too.

That inversion—accusation as verdict, apology as confession—is the pattern Szetela finds repeated across the period, and it is the same pattern Wertham’s critics found in the comics hearings and the Salem court records. In each case the panic dispensed with evidence precisely because its object was not truth but purification. The nearer analogy, and the one that gives this review its title, is the Cultural Revolution. The campaigns Szetela documents reproduced, in miniature and without the violence, the choreography of the struggle session: the public accusation, the demanded self-criticism, the abject apology that served not to close the case but to confirm the charge, the special zeal reserved for the movement’s own. Zhao’s statement withdrawing her novel read less like a publishing decision than a confession extracted in advance of trial, and it was one of dozens in the period that followed the same prosecutorial zeal.

When a college student named Brooke Nelson remarked in a local South Dakota newspaper that Sarah Dessen’s novels were fine for teenagers but beneath a university Common Read program, Dessen displayed the comment to her 268,000 Twitter followers, and a procession of bestselling authors such as Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner—joined by the chief operating officer of We Need Diverse Books, an organization devoted to the young—descended on the undergraduate, forcing Nelson to deactivate her social media accounts. Northern State University even issued an apology to Dessen for the harm its student had caused her. The Red Guards of the analogy were students disciplining their teachers. Their American counterparts were, as often as not, celebrated adults disciplining students, debut novelists, and one another, while the institutions charged with defending authors elected, in nearly every documented case, to join them.

What lifts the book above the genre of cancel-culture complaint is that Szetela tested his central claim in a laboratory. With Michael Macy and Shiyu Ji at Cornell’s Social Dynamics Lab, he asked hundreds of American readers to evaluate four poems presented under pseudonyms, among them T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales“ and Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California.” Reading anonymously, fewer than 8 percent of readers called the Ginsberg poem homophobic and fewer than 4 percent called the Eliot antisemitic. A second group read the same poems accompanied by two sentences of manufactured criticism from a fictional critic, with the warning that their own evaluations might be shared publicly on social media. The accusation rate for the Ginsberg—a canonical work by a gay leftist, anthologized in collections of gay literature—rose above 42 percent while it only rose above 33 percent for Eliot; every poem in the set became objectionable to a third or more of its readers. The experiment suggests that the panic was never principally about the content of books. It was about the price of being seen to defend them.

Szetela’s thesis inverts the standard refrain of the cultural right. Where conservatives lament that the left captured the culture while the right merely won elections, Szetela argues that the elections were the prize and the culture the consolation, and every campaign of cancellation handed the right a gift it promptly monetized. When the Seuss estate withdrew six titles in 2021 over racial caricature, Ted Cruz sold signed copies of Green Eggs and Ham and raised $125,000 in twenty-four hours, crediting “lefties losing their minds“; a Pennsylvania congressman introduced the GRINCH Act to safeguard children’s access to historic books; Fox News ran the story for three weeks, and 77 percent of Republican voters reported hearing about it. The polling Szetela assembles shows why the strategy worked on more than the converted. In the 2020 American National Election Studies survey—a sample dominated by Biden voters—a majority said people had become too easily offended. A 2021 Morning Consult poll found that every generation held a negative view of cancel culture, and that the most negative cohort was the youngest: 59 percent of thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds disapproved of the practice conducted in their name, while only 22 percent of Generation Z viewed capitalism favorably. The young, on this evidence, were considerably more radical than their protectors and considerably less interested in burning books.

Szetela argues that their targets are not “the federal, state, and local legislators who shape the austere economic conditions of childhood” but individual authors, and the crusade never once inconveniences capital—because the crusade is itself a business. Sensitivity readers, he calculates from industry rates of half a cent to a cent per word, earn an effective $75 to $150 an hour, more than the schoolteachers and firefighters who actually tend the young. Ibram X. Kendi, holder of a $625,000 MacArthur grant, was paid $32,500 for a single Zoom lecture at a public university—roughly $541 per minute. Robin DiAngelo and Philip Nel, whose Was the Cat in the Hat Black? appeared from Oxford in 2017, figure as the credentialed clerisy of the outrage economy, converting expertise in critical theory into a franchise for detecting heresy. And Amazon, whose public commitments to antiracism are extensive, paid a union-avoidance consultant $3,200 a day to help defeat an organizing drive among its own workers. The juxtaposition is the point: a movement so loud about social justice proved so uninterested in power because its livelihood depended on it.

The book’s most valuable material is the testimony of the people who run the industry, speaking on condition of anonymity about the fear that governs it. One vice president at a Big Five house—among the most powerful figures in American publishing—dismissed the policing of fictional characters with a profane four-word reminder that the object in question is a novel, refused to be recorded, and twice reconfirmed that no word would carry a name. An award-winning author declined to answer a question about right-wing censorship, declined a question about left-wing censorship, ended the interview, and then emailed to ask that the recording be deleted and the conversation never mentioned. An editor of a small literary journal admitted to rejecting a talented writer’s work sight unseen for fear of “contamination by association.“ A library district director described colleagues relocating children’s books into closed historical collections so that browsing patrons cannot find them, and others declining to purchase bestsellers they deem bad for the public.

Szetela is a progressive sympathetic to the diversification of American literature that the panic claimed as its purpose and it is precisely this sympathy that gives the indictment its force. That Book Is Dangerous! cannot be dismissed as a tract of the right because it is nothing of the kind; it is a report from inside the church, filed by a believer who watched the inquisition devour the congregation. And yet the book describes a world that has already ended. Its narrative rarely leaves 2022. There is no mention of the 2024 election or of the second Trump administration; the manuscript appears to have been completed well before either, and the years it spent in production have converted a dispatch into a document. The campaigns that ended careers in 2019 now routinely fizzle; the publishing houses that once capitulated within hours have discovered the option of silence; the platform on which the degradation ceremonies were staged no longer exists in the form that made them possible. A reader in 2026 encounters Szetela’s warnings the way one encounters civil defense pamphlets: as evidence of what people once feared. Considered as evidence, it is something better—the surest sign that the fever has broken is that its history can now be written.

Whether the fever has broken permanently is a different question. The apparatus, he shows, was not winding down but migrating upward, out of YA fiction and into adult letters and the institutions of state. HarperCollins adopted contract language permitting termination when an author’s conduct “evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals“—a morality clause of the sort Condé Nast asked its journalists to sign, and whose most vocal defenders were progressives rather than free-market conservatives. Journalists at the New York Times demanded sensitivity readers for the newspaper of record. After Poetry retracted a poem by the Princeton poet Michael Dickman, Tracy K. Smith, the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States, proposed formalized processes of accountability and reparations for offending verse; her successor Joy Harjo floated extending the Indian Arts and Crafts Act—a statute carrying fines of $250,000 and five years’ imprisonment—to literature. Hundreds of Princeton faculty petitioned their university to investigate and discipline racist “research and publication.” Helen Andrews has argued in Compact that the “feminine patterns of behavior“ now dominant in the professions—accusation, consensus enforcement, reputational sanction—guarantee the disposition a future, whatever becomes of its present machinery. Szetela’s own evidence supports her: nothing in his account suggests that the institutions that capitulated have acquired principles. They have merely changed their estimate of the danger.

This points to the book’s deeper limitation: its critique is limited to tactics, not ends. Szetela objects to the panic because it devoured the left’s own and delivered elections to the right rather than because its animating premises are false. His remedies are the familiar remedies of the tradition he inhabits: public arts programs, better school funding, the abolition of unpaid internships, redistribution. The demand, in effect, is that the left stop prosecuting authors and resume prosecuting capital. The book falls short of scrutinizing the sensibility that made the prosecutions possible in the first place. Szetela denounces the infantilization of readers with real force—his own chapter on childhood innocence argues that the mythologized child is a vessel for adult politics—yet he declines to ask what in the intellectual culture of his own side produced that myth, or whether a politics that retains these premises can be trusted not to reproduce the panic.

Nowhere is the argument's flaw more visible than in his treatment of YA fiction, the genre in which the panic burned hottest. Here Szetela’s own data does the heaviest work. Citing Bowker Market Research, he reports that 55 percent of YA buyers are adults, the largest bloc of them aged thirty to forty-four, and that 78 percent of the time these adults are buying for themselves; other estimates put adult purchases near 70 percent of all YA titles. His conclusion—that the field is largely adults writing for other adults, and that the moral crusade over children’s literature is in reality a crusade over literature for grown-ups conducted in children’s names—is among the sharpest in the book. But he stops at the demography and spares the sensibility. A readership of adults that demands moral hygiene, simplicity, and safety from its fiction has already conceded the censor’s premise. Szetela indicts the enforcers and leaves their employers unexamined.

That Book Is Dangerous! is several books at once: an insider’s exposé of private censorship, a class-first polemic against liberal “slacktivism,” a social-scientific study of conformity, a plea for the left to trade cultural policing for material politics, a warning about the right’s many political victories and a history of the sensitivity era in American letters. It succeeds unevenly in most and completely as the last. As a warning it comes too late; as a history it could hardly be better timed. The panics of the past century have run in cycles of roughly a generation—the interval required for institutions to forget—and the conditions Szetela documents, from the morality clauses still in the contracts to the conflict norms still dominant in the professions, make another cycle more likely than not. When it arrives, his book will stand as the record of how the last one worked, who profited from it, and what it cost.