https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/from-forbidden-to-top-sellers?r=3snn7d
From Forbidden to Top Sellers
- If books are any indication, the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex is losing in the marketplace of ideas.
John Leake — Sep 09, 2025
*** begin quote ***
The dummies who tried to impose a censorship regime in the United States should have understood that their scheme wouldn’t work.
Key actors in the “censorship-industrial complex,” as Michael Shellenberger calls it, should have understood that their enterprise was doomed to fail, just as the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books), maintained between 1560 to 1966, was doomed to fail.
Notable authors on the Index included Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Nikos Kazantzakis, Emanuel Swedenborg, Baruch Spinoza, Desiderius Erasmus, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Niccolò Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius.
Rather than censoring and banning ideas, it’s always better to discuss and debate them.
*** end quote ***
I remember in Catholic High Skrule each week, the Diocesan newspaper (I forget the name) would print the Forbidden Books and Forbidden Movies lists. And the good Christian Brothers would make a point of reminding us that these would damage our souls. Little did they realize it was, just like Adam and Eve, tempting us. I know everyone tried to read or see these “evil demons”. Most of us succeeded. Word quickly spread which were worth the effort and which weren’t. Laugh!
I don’t think it made a difference.
If I was the Principal I would have put the summer required reading list as “Prohibited” and it would have gotten read.
Sigh! Those were the “easy days”.
— 30 —
Reinke Faces Life 