“The Librarians” is a 2025 film by Kim Snyder. My ex-librarian wife and I attended a screening, with a panel discussion, by the New York State Writers Institute. It’s about book purgings, with school librarians attacked by right-wing political agitators. Texas and Florida are epicenters.
“Moms for Liberty” is a leading front group. They like to sound grass-roots, but this is part of a well-funded national effort, pouring money into local school board elections. It’s not originating with concerned parents, but rather whipped up by calculating political operators, exploiting this as a wedge issue. Books in libraries were never previously a problem.
While many major societal institutions have crumpled to Trump regime dictates, librarians seem to be a major exception. Heroically bearing up to attacks that aren’t just verbiage. Quite a few have lost their jobs; many threatened with physical violence.
The film portrays mostly the librarians, but the other side gets a fair hearing, in their own words (which don’t do them credit). They want to ban any books about race issues, or having to do with sex or sexuality, especially non-conforming. Labelled “pornography,” with librarians accused of “grooming” children for aberrant sexual abuse.
Thus the mantra of “protecting children,” a constant right-wing trope, across a range of issues. It’s dishonest. They’re sure not protecting kids from ICE’s depredations; many who are U.S. citizens have had parents torn away; in fact many children themselves have been victimized. And while anti-abortion activists like to say they’re protecting the unborn, once born those children are of no concern to these crusaders, supporting policies that impoverish their families.
The whole “grooming” panic is a fraud too. As if kids are forced to read deviant pornography so they’ll be willing pedo victims. Never happened. Librarians may help youngsters by suggesting appropriate books, but don’t shove books at them. And their attackers, mounting moralistic high horses to beat upon the word “pornography,” don’t know what they’re talking about.
The film portrayed one movement activist, Courtney Gore, elected to a Texas school board determined to battle pornography in libraries. But, assiduously investigating, she could find none. Reporting this publicly, she was viciously attacked.
What this movement is trying to “protect” children against is learning about life and reality. About the diversity of human beings.
Another woman was shown, at a public meeting, vehemently invoking the Bible to condemn any portrayal of gays in library books. Then we meet her gay son, who was kicked out of the family. He speaks at another meeting, of how as a child he’d been inculcated with the Bible — a book full of murder, rape, genocide, slavery, and other horrors. His mother was present there too but kept her distance, unrepentant. This seemed very very sad.
This whole book-banning movement is spurred by Christianity and supposed Biblical dictates. Actually much sexual stuff okayed in the Bible would outrage any normal person today — treating women as commodities — while the book hardly even mentions same-sex relations. But these Bible-thumpers latch onto that (while ignoring so much else) because they’re hung up about sex in general and freaked out in particular by gay and transgender people. With whom they can’t relate as fellow humans.
“Hate the sin but love the sinner” is not their mindset. (Not that gayness is sinful in any rational moral sense.) What the film depicts is downright hatred. Showing us yet again that religion, far from promoting morality and goodness, often does the opposite, so scrambling believers’ brains that they can’t tell right from wrong. Their whole moral vision skewed by falsehood.
What they also want to “protect” children from is racial concerns. Thus the effort to ban any books by or about Black people — especially addressing slavery. It’s ironic that folks who screamed that removing Confederate monuments was “erasing history” want to erase slavery’s history — as though the Civil War had nothing to do with that anyway! Now the racist Trump regime is pushing this great cover-up.
They oppose portraying American history as all bad (“bad,bad,bad,bad,” one voice in the film said). But they want to make it all good, zero bad. However, America’s greatness does not lie with a sanitized version of our history — rather, with an honest one, showing that we’ve progressed, faced up to our past failings, and worked fix them. That made me proud of my country.
Those history scrubbers plead against making white kids feel bad about themselves over slavery. Well, slavery was a monstrous crime, which everyone should feel bad about. But that’s not the same as personal guilt. One panelist discussing the film, Roger Green, said the movement underestimates children, who are perfectly capable of understanding this.
It’s actually these white nationalists themselves who are still fixated on slavery and race. Slavery and its reverberations continue looming large in American society today, because they can’t let it go. They’re the ones who cannot put it all behind us and move on. Just like with gay and trans people, they can’t relate to Blacks as just fellow human beings.
As ever, the ugly racist behavior of white supremacists proves them the inferior ones. And that racist hostility toward non-whites is the core ethos of today’s right-wing Republicanism. Everything else is window-dressing.
The Rational Pessimist 
