'Lead with fear': MAGA and the role of book bans in fascism and authoritarianism

SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Elon Musk, now a prominent figure in the MAGA movement, often describes himself as a "free speech absolutist" who isn't afraid to fight the "woke mind virus." Yet many book bans are coming from MAGA Republicans and Christian nationalists who, like Musk, are aggressive supporters of President Donald Trump.

Author Samira Ahmed warned against the dangers of book banning during a Saturday, March 1 appearance on MSNBC, telling host Ali Velshi that efforts to control what people can or cannot read are a recipe for "fascism" and "authoritarianism."

In her 2020 fiction book "Interment," Ahmed depicts the character Layla Amin as a 17-year-old who is confined to an internment camp for Muslims in the United States of the future. When Velshi asked Ahmed why she opened "Internment" with a depiction of a book burning, she referenced fellow author Margaret Atwood, best known for her dystopian 1985 novel "The Handmaid's Tale."

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The Mumbai-born Ahmed told Velshi, "Just like Margaret Atwood said, everything that takes place in 'Internment,' virtually everything, is something that has existed in history. I mean, Nazis banned books, and then, they burned books. There were massive countrywide book burnings in Germany in 1933. Almost all of those books were written by or about queer or trans individuals."

Ahmed continued, "And so, starting with a book burning felt like a very natural way to begin this novel, because regimes' authoritarians have always wanted to ban books. They have jailed artists because they want to hide the truth. They want everyone to have this very myopic point of view that they get to dictate, and that's why I started it with a book burning."

Velshi noted that "Internment" depicts "fear" as a tool of repression, which, the MSNBC host noted, "feels like a lot of what's going on in America this minute."

Ahmed responded, "It really does, although I wrote the entire first draft of this novel in 2016. I mean, I think we've seen through history that fascists and authoritarians always want to lead with fear. They're just like bullies, right? Bullies want to make you cower, and what we need to do is stand up to those bullies. Because we know, for example, with banned books, the vast majority of Americans, 70 percent, do not agree with censorship."

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The author continued, "They don't want book bans, and we need to speak with a collective and powerful voice because we, our voices, can stand up to that fear. We must stand up to that, and we must say to these bullies, 'No, we will not be silenced. And that's not happening today, not on our watch, because an attack on books is an attack on freedom.'"

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