With Americans’ free speech threatened by politicians’ bluster and federal agents swarming the region, welcome to Banned Books Week. Is there a better time to mark the annual observance of censorship in America?

These are precarious times, indeed, for those who support our First Amendment. To refresh, that’s the one which guarantees freedom of speech and press; Americans’ right to peaceable assembly and to petition our government for redress of grievances.

But, as late-night television hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have found, there’s no certainty in this precarious era while taking potshots at pols. Yet one president, Lyndon Johnson, realized threats to free speech and reading, pointing out in the tumultuous 1960s: “Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intole

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