Substacks

Book banners target public libraries Judd Legum

Published

10 months ago

September 21, 2023

The campaign to censor America’s libraries is expanding.

A new report from the American Library Association (ALA) finds that this year, between January 1 and August 31, there have been “695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles.” The number of books challenged “has increased by 20 percent from the same reporting period in 2022.” Last year was the highest number of challenges recorded since the ALA began collecting data two decades ago. In all of 2019, there were only 377 challenges.

While much of the attention on book bans in the United States has centered around school libraries, the ALA report reveals that censorship efforts in 2023 are just as likely to target public libraries. According to the report, 49% of challenges to books were in public libraries — up from 16% in 2022.

“Expanding beyond their well-organized attempts to sanitize school libraries, groups with a political agenda have turned their crusade to public libraries, the very embodiment of the First Amendment in our society,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said. “This places politics over the well-being and education of young people and everyone’s right to access and use the public library.”

For the most part, the book bans are not being pursued by individual parents concerned about a particular book. Instead they are coordinated efforts by ideological organizations seeking to purge scores of books from the shelves. Challenges of 100 books or more are not uncommon.

In Front Royal, Virginia, right-wing activists held “two book-banning BBQ events.” Attendees were offered food, beer, and challenge forms targeting books at the local public library. The events resulted in 500 challenges to 150 books in the Samuels Public Library system. Most challenged books had LGBTQ characters or themes. In June, the Warren County Board of Supervisors voted to withhold 75% of the library budget until the library takes action to “protect our children from sexually explicit material and ensure parents have control over their children’s reading choices.” The library director resigned last month.

This week, a group of 175 artists and entertainers led by LeVar Burton, including Ariana Grande, Guillermo del Toro, Padma Lakshmi, Ron Perlman, and Amanda Gorman, signed an open letter denouncing book bans. “We cannot stress enough how these censorious efforts will not end with book bans,” the letter states. “It’s only a matter of time before regressive, suppressive ideologues will shift their focus toward other forms of art and entertainment, to further their attacks and efforts to scapegoat marginalized communities, particularly BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks.”

In a recent interview with the New York Times, ALA President Emily Drabinski explained that while “attacks on libraries right now are shaped and framed as attacks on books” these efforts are really “attacks on people and attacks on children.” In retaliation for advocating against book bans, some conservative states — including Montana, Missouri and Texas — have announced they are “severing ties with the ALA.”

Florida automates book bans

In Florida, legislators recently passed a law to make it easier to ban books. The law, HB 1069, which was approved by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on May 17, states that, among other things, “Parents shall have the right to read passages [at a school board meeting] from any material that is subject to an objection.” If a school board chooses to deny someone “the right to read passages due to explicit or obscene content,” the law states that “the school district shall discontinue the use of the material.”

The law, which went into effect on July 1, also states that “[a]ny material that is subject to an objection… must be removed within 5 school days of receipt of the objection and remain unavailable to students of that school until the objection is resolved.” Instructional material that may be removed includes content that is “pornographic,” “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” or material that is deemed “not suited to students needs” or “inappropriate for the grade level.” The law also states that book objections that are “not resolved at the district level can now be reviewed by the State Board of Education,” which has been filled with conservative appointees by DeSantis. The law additionally expands Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law to now prohibit “classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity” through the eighth grade, rather than third grade.

Right-wing groups in Florida are already using this law to their advantage. According to the Observer, a chapter of Moms for Liberty “was successful in pulling 34 books after the school board chair stopped people from reading passages or placed a content warning on the speaker” at a recent School Board meeting in Indian River County. Parents in Volusia County are planning to use the new law after being disappointed by the amount of books banned in the 2022-2023 academic year. According to the Observer, a “total of 89 books were challenged” in the district last year, and two of those books were removed. Parents are “hoping to get more books removed” this year and are “relying on Florida House Bill 1069 to get this accomplished.”

Book bans are bigger in Texas

With 30 book challenges at school and public libraries in the first six months of the year, Texas has the highest number of attempts to ban or restrict books, the latest ALA report shows. The ALA‘s 2022 report found that Texas had the most book challenges, with 93 attempts recorded. This number, Axios reports, is “nearly double the total in the second-highest state, Pennsylvania, which had 56 attempts on 302 titles.”

“Book challenges and censorship are nothing new. Libraries have faced these issues as long as libraries have been in existence,” Texas Library Association executive director Shirley Robinson said. “But the volume of challenges, and the vitriol against librarians, is unprecedented.”

Just this week, a teacher in Southeast Texas was fired after assigning a graphic novel based on the diary of Anne Frank to an eighth-grade class. According to school district officials, the book, which has previously been at the center of censorship battles in other districts, was “never approved.” But local news outlet KFDM reports that “it was on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year.”

In another Southeast Texas School District, Katy Independent School District (ISD), an internal committee removed 14 books in August and September. Titles removed include Wacky Wednesday by Dr. Seuss, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume, and Draw Me a Star by Eric Carle. The district claims all the titles that were removed are “inappropriate for children” but has yet to release any details on the reasoning behind the removals, The Houston Chronicle reports.

The bans in Katy ISD follow a change in the district’s policy that made it easier to remove books. Under the amended policy, approved at the end of July, district trustees can “ban reading materials and prevent incoming materials without a review committee” if at least “two board members agree.” Prior to the change, “Katy ISD removed four books in 2022, eight in 2021 and four in the first seven months of 2023.”

Biden appoints “book ban coordinator”

This month, the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights tapped Matt Nosanchuk as its “book ban coordinator.” In his role, Nosanchuk, whose previous work has focused on Jewish and LGBTQ issues, will be tasked with “monitor[ing] book removal efforts” and determining whether a book ban violates federal civil rights law. Nosanchuk will also “provide new trainings for schools nationwide” on these topics, including on how to “submit complaints about potential violations to the Office for Civil Rights.” So far, the first training, which will be sponsored by the ALA, has “1,000 attendees” registered.

The Education Department’s appointment marks a growing recognition of the threat of book censorship. In May, the department found that “a Georgia school district may have violated its students’ civil rights by removing certain books from its libraries.” According to officials, the “debate concerning the books’ removal left some students feeling targeted.”

“As we’re seeing this issue of book removals and book bans surging around the country, it’s important to remind every school community that they have a federal civil rights obligation to not operate a hostile environment based on the race or sex of their students,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education Catherine E. Lhamon told the New York Times. “We are prepared to enforce those laws.”

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

10 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

17 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

21 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641