Meet Florida's Top Book Banner (The Daily Show)

I remember the long-ago days when The Daily Show interviewed outlandish individuals who were blissfully unaware that they were being set up by a fake news show. Maybe Bruce Friedman was just unaware.

Friedman is Florida's top book banner. He's the president of Florida's No Left Turn chapter, an organization that is determined that children should not be indoctrinated with any beliefs except the correct ones. And he has feelings about public schools and his son. As reported by Kumal Dey for meaww.com

Friedman described his son as "bright," "gifted" and "a fine young man who is considerably smarter than I am," adding, "He makes me proud, but I am not going to stick him in a school with groomers and pedophiles and twisted sick people that think these… books and many like them are okay to present to a child. They are not okay. There's no literal literary value to any of this. It's poison."

That particular occasion was Friedman getting his mic cut off for reading naughty bits at a board meeting. He's most active in Clay County, where the Jewish father has agitated to have the graphic novel version of Diary of Anne Frank pulled from libraries. Sophie's Choice, too. Jewish Telegraph Agency profiled him, along with a list of just a few of his targeted books.

Under a picture of him in a t-shirt that says "My body. My Child. My choice." the article lists some of his greatest hits. 

In objecting to a children’s biography of Harriet Tubman, for example, he says, “Telling them that the Civil War was all about slavery is a lie.” The picture book “Arthur’s Birthday,” featuring the cartoon aardvark, was bad in his view because “it is not appropriate to discuss ‘spin the bottle’ with elementary school children.” To Friedman, “Americanah,” a prizewinning novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the immigrant experience, is “a horrible piece of garbage.” Reading from his own file on the book, he listed off its problems: “Attempted suicide, immigration fraud, promiscuity, infidelity, abortion, racism, sex, critical race theory.”

He reads the books. One of his challenges was against Slaughterhouse Five, a book he read when he was 12.  “When I read it I had no regard for my own innocence,” he told JTA. He keeps files on his laptop (you'll see it in the piece below) where he notes in which way the book violates his extremely broad list of all the things children should not be exposed to. "

Friedman is responsible for over a third of all book challenges in the state in 2023. "They're all porn," he says. 

This would be the guy that Ron DeSantis was talking about earlier this year when he announced that the reading suppression law needed to be "fixed," claiming that outlandish calls for banning classics and non-porny kiddie books was just someone trying to make the law look foolish. Except, of course, Friedman is delivering an authentic type of foolishness. 

But somehow, Friedman agreed to sit down with Michael Kosta for a Daily Show piece, and he is everything you might imagine he is. Give the segment a view.