‘The Librarians,’ playing at the Big Picture in Waitsfield tonight, is hard to stomach. It’s a documentary about recent efforts to normalize banning books in school and public libraries.
It’s hard to stomach, but also critical to watch and more importantly, it’s inspiring to see how librarians stood their ground and continue to stand their ground.
The film, directed by Kim Snyder and produced by Snyder and local filmmaker Janique Robillard, takes a no-holds-barred look at the ugliness that swept parts of the nation during and after the pandemic, starting when Texas congressman Matt Krause produced a list of 850 books he deemed inappropriate.
The film gets up close and personal with the librarians and the school boards and the parents and Moms for Liberty and other groups that used the pretense of concern for kids to advance their own religious beliefs.
The impact of what happened builds slowly and gets more horrifying as it reveals the subversion of the project and the role that money played in advancing this agenda. Ostensibly the books on Krause’s list were inappropriate because they were said be pornographic. But the librarians – every single one – pushed back.
They pushed back to their school administrators. They pushed back to their school boards and to their communities. They pointed out that the books on Krause’s list were LGBTQ titles. They were books around race, they were books about history. They were histories of the KKK.
School librarians were harassed. They were threatened. They were subjected to social media bombardment. They had to hire security. They were fired in droves.
What started in Texas spread like wildfire to Florida, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Virginia, and beyond. Attempts were made to ban books in Dearborn, Michigan, and in New Jersey.
“As a librarian, it was traumatic. Locking up books felt like putting students in locked closets,” said one librarian.
The late president Eisenhower is quoted stating: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”
“Control the library and control the community and you can control the flow of ideas,” another librarian notes.
The film includes chilling footage of Joseph Goebbels encouraging the burning of books and shifts to footage of a raging book fire in Tennessee in 2022 with people chanting “burn it, burn it,” reveling in throwing books on the fire and one woman asking “let me throw some books.”
The librarians, and citizens who pushed (and are pushing back) remain the heroes in this drama. They are the most unlikely subversives and the fiercest defenders of the Constitution and what First Amendment freedoms look like for everyone, not just those who share the same set of religious beliefs.
“Even in the darkest days, this is what we do,” said one librarian. Another said that being a librarian, researching was what she did. After being called a pornographer, a pedophile, and a groomer of children, she dug into the finances of Moms For Liberty as well as the platform for the organization that calls for taking over school boards. It’s been playing out before our eyes in real time and that continues.
Funded by some of the same people who funded the January 6 Insurrection and aided by funds from the cellphone provider Patriot Mobile, the take-overs of local school boards is not organic. It is systematic. And that’s scary.
This is a movie that will scare you and make you angry and bewilder you as you try to understand how anyone thinks they have the right to censor what people read (and think). But the librarians keep pushing back. They’re not done, and they’re not backing down.
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