Rep. April Cromer and her allies dox librarians
Rep. April Cromer and her allies dox librarians
This piece has been updated to reflect further posts from the Anderson Moms for Liberty chair, who has continued to dox librarians on Facebook, using the FOIA request. (See “Proud Mom for Liberty.”)
Late last year, SC Representative April Cromer made an extremely broad Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request1 with Anderson One Schools which resulted in a production of around 17,000 pages of documents at the school district’s expense2.
Cromer’s request and further information are available here, via SC-ACLU.
Placing strain on district staff is itself a frequent tactic of Moms for Liberty and related groups, but the FOIA request and Cromer’s cooperation have also been used to reveal names and personal information of several Anderson One educators, including in a blog post light on evidence and thick with conspiracy theories and out-of-context quotes. And Cromer’s close political allies have moved quickly to use the post to call for the termination of librarians and teachers targeted by the request.
This tactic, often called doxing, has been a frequent method of harassing librarians, teachers, board members, and other district employees. Many examples were captured in formal SC Department of Education documents as part of the work of the state Teacher Retention and Recruitment Task Force (see appendix) and across the country. SC Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver explicitly referenced this document in a politicized attack against state librarians.
An analysis of statements and actions by Cromer and her association demonstrates a willingness to use state power to punish school employees for expressing views they don’t like, and to remove those views from the public sphere in favor of those supported by partisan political groups.
Cromer was elected in 2022 and quickly signed onto the most extreme parts of the SC Freedom Caucus agenda. In perhaps the most well-known example, she co-sponsored a bill with members of the group that would have required the death penalty for pregnant women who obtained abortions.
Cromer ran on a platform linking “school choice” (vouchers/ tax subsidies for parents sending their children to private schools) with an opposition to what she called “Critical Race Theory” at the time— she has since pivoted, along with Moms for Liberty, to a broader focus on “pornography,” labeling librarians and other school staff who promote books she doesn’t like as “groomers”.
As is often the case with the Moms for Liberty movement, Cromer’s interest in books is probably not really about books, but about a larger set of culture war issues.
Anti-trans policies
Cromer is a vocal supporter of bills to limit the rights of transgender students, and helped the Clemson University College Republicans group successfully pressure the school to remove tampons from men’s restrooms. (Evidently, in addition to being transphobic, Cromer and the College Republicans weren’t able to imagine a world in which a male student might buy a tampon for a female student.)
Cromer has also supported bills and resolutions to restrict gender-affirming care for people up to 26 years of age, declare “Moms for Liberty Day at the Statehouse,” allow her to help pack the Anderson public library board, and forbid public universities to require diversity, equity, and inclusion statements (which, according to the testimony of multiple university officials, they already do not).
“Abolishing” diversity requirements
During a February House E.P.W. hearing for the DEI bill (video available here), Cromer at one point (about 49 minutes in) seemed to misunderstand— or pretended to misunderstand— the definition of the word diversity. She asked a university official, “Has there ever been a time when you, maybe, had to take a more diverse patient who may not be as ill as a non-diverse patient?”
Cromer seemed to be attempting to lead the official to say that a “non-diverse” (white) patient had been “displaced” by a “diverse” (nonwhite) patient. The university official seemed understandably perplexed: the purpose of requiring diverse groups for medical studies is to have representative sampling so that the study results are useable; there is no such thing as a “diverse person”.
Repeatedly, officials had to explain to Cromer and other committee members that national accrediting bodies require universities to have elements that the bill might label as DEI, and that national research institutions such as the NIH have requirements for diversity in the sample groups used in grant-funded studies.
Cromer suggested that universities in SC could get away with “abolishing” diversity requirements because other states had, yet the anti-DEI elements of Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” had already been blocked by a district court, a decision that has since been upheld by a federal appeals court, with the decision written by a Republican appointee3.
In questioning Clemson Senior Vice President Max Allen (at about 1:05:00 in the video) Cromer read a standard diversity statement included on a school application, which affirmed that the university does not discriminate in hiring based on race, gender, or any other category, and also “encourages women and minorities to apply”.
“It sounds like you’re excluding white men,” Cromer said.
As Allen patiently pointed out, Clemson has struggled “throughout its rich history” with diversity and wants to avoid having a population that is “only white men”. (In fact, 85% of Clemson’s population is currently white, according to Census data.4)
Proud Mom for Liberty
Cromer has vocally supported Moms for Liberty chapters, both in her own district and in other parts of the state.
One of Cromer’s allies is Anderson Moms for Liberty chair Carly Carter, who is conspicuously featured, along with Cromer and her FOIA request, in the blog post doxing educators.
In recent posts to the Anderson Moms for Liberty Facebook group (redacted screenshots available here), Carter further doxed the staff members and demonstrated the level of cooperation between herself and Cromer by revealing a number of un-redacted emails from Cromer’s FOIA request. These contained phone numbers, work locations, and other personal information, not only of the targeted staff members, but of individuals who don’t work for the district.
To my eyes, these emails provide context that was lacking in the blog post, and establish how difficult Moms for Liberty and Carter were making librarians’ lives. They discuss how to cope with increasingly difficult choices in text selection, a student who has been directed by a parent to film teachers, and ways to have “nuanced discussions” about books that won’t result in challenges and harassment from Moms for Liberty.
In another social media post, Carter mentioned meeting with the principal of one of the Anderson schools specifically targeted in Cromer’s request “to express our concern over minors having access to pornographic materials,” which she then defines as materials which are “rated in the 4 or 5 categories in BookLooks,” and says the principal has agreed to remove these books.
A FOIA request with Anderson One revealed only one formal book challenge. According to an email from Anderson One’s acting FOIA officer, “There is no record of a formal challenge of the ‘15 books’ referenced on the Moms for Liberty FaceBook post dated July 21, 2023. The only official challenges that the District has received are on the 9 books contained on the list that I forwarded [in the FOIA production].”
Carter also presented during a May 9, 2023, Anderson-area “barn meeting” featuring at least one parent who had encouraged his child to film local school staff without permission. (One out-of-context quote in the blog post involved librarians expressing anxiety about the “creepy” behavior of the student.) Audio from the meeting features Carter sharing the conspiracy theory, central to Moms for Liberty’s overall platform, that unspecified forces want to “dismantle the traditional family”— a phrase with a long history in anti-LGBTQ+ activism— and that librarians providing diverse texts is somehow a part of this agenda. This followed another speaker describing a literal “spiritual battle for the minds, the hearts, and the souls of our kids” (a phrase Superintendent Weaver and others in the Moms for Liberty movement have used in the past).
And though Cromer has seemed to feign confusion about why librarians would want to keep library catalogs up to date by removing entries for books that have already been banned or otherwise removed (one of the most pointed allegations in the blog post), Carter’s remarks make it pretty clear that the environment in Anderson can be very antagonistic to educators. During her presentation, Carter suggested— inaccurately— that state law defines any text with “sexual content” as pornography, and encouraged attendees to file complaints with the Sheriff’s Office against school staff for providing “pornography” to students.
This is the exact tactic used in Beaufort, SC, as described in a recent 60 Minutes piece on Moms for Liberty, and which has resulted in multiple ongoing examples of harassments of librarians, including at least one threat to report school staff to the FBI, despite the local Sheriff’s office pointing out that the libraries do not contain illegal material.
Carter encouraged attendees to undertake their own investigations of schools: “It takes all hands on deck. I can’t possibly go through all these schools.”
The impact on students
Jessicka Spearman, an Anderson parent, told me her student, who has testified publicly against book bans and school censorship, is now concerned that she or other students could also be doxed. Spearman said multiple students share this anxiety.
Another parent, Clemson University professor Faiza Jamil, her son, a high school honors student currently researching the book ban phenomenon for his AP Seminar course, was upset by the attacks on books and librarians in the district. Dr. Jamil shared that she had chosen to move to Anderson so that her son could attend a school where several of the educators doxed in the blog post worked. She called the librarian at her school, who was specifically named in Cromer’s FOIA’s request and smeared in the blog post, “a treasure to the district”.
Anderson libraries do not contain pornography (obviously).
Neither Carter nor Cromer can support the claim that state libraries contain pornography— which is defined by state and federal laws to include versions of the “Miller test” requiring the consideration of the primary purpose of a work, and the artistic and literary value. The obvious purpose of the Miller test is prevent officials from violating citizens’ First Amendment rights by making illegal everything which has broadly-defined “sexual content” (and to prevent folks like Cromer and Carter from using “obscenity” as a kind of loophole to legally censor books they don’t like for political reasons).5
And if Cromer found any examples in her 17,000 pages of FOIA discovery, she conspicuously didn’t share any of them in the blog post.
In the “barn meeting,” Carter had to stretch the meaning of “pornography” beyond the breaking point, describing her search through a teacher’s social media feed to find a “root word list” that supposedly contained inappropriate vocabulary words as examples.
The real issue seems to be representation of diverse characters and experiences.
Dr. Jamil, who is a developmental scientist and former K-12 teacher, said that today’s parents should be aware of the unique importance of diverse texts in their children’s lives, saying “The fact of the matter is that their children are going to be adults in a world that is far more diverse than the one they grew up in.”
Dr. Jamil writes, in a passage highlighted by her son as part of his own AP Seminar research,
In an increasingly diverse and interconnected reality, children need to be educated to understand and respect the different experiences of the human beings who walk the earth beside them, and the adults in their lives must model how to communicate across those differences.
Part of the goal of the movement with which Cromer has aligned herself seems to be to push back on the very skills and information that make this kind of communication possible.
Carter said the teacher she followed on Facebook wrote, “My job is to show students that we’re are all human through literature,” and asked for recommendations for books for her classroom so that “my Black students look on my shelf and know that they are represented… Whether you’re black, Hispanic, gay, trans, or an immigrant, you’re human and deserve to be treated as such. We must do better. We must be better.”
Carter’s interpretation of her Facebook investigation: “So, with those two things together, it was very clear that that was a very intentional move, to bring these words into English lesson in an effort to expose the children to these words so that her idea of doing better to, you know, dismantle things.”
Carter also described a lesson at another high school on redlining— which involves longstanding racial discrimination in housing, and which continues to shape contemporary neighborhood demographics throughout the US, contributing to health inequalities and other issues — saying, “It was something that happened in history, something that can be told in a way that is factual and unbiased.” Carter took issue with a video the teacher used to describe redlining because it featured the author of the 1619 Project. She called the district to ask if the teacher provided a both-sides perspective on redlining, suggesting something like “a PragerU video that dismantles the 1619 Project”. (PragerU is a heavily biased site that pushes a version of history that complements its anti-trans agenda, and which famously claimed that abolitionist Frederick Douglass defended the Founding Fathers for not abolishing the slave trade.)
Cromer seems to share Carter’s views. In addition to vocally opposing “DEI” (however she may define that term), and promoting the narrative that librarians (usually those who are supporting diverse representation in books) are “groomers,” she has appeared at several public meetings with Carter and other members of Moms for Liberty and the similar group PACE for Lex 2 (the group behind literally every book challenge in Lexington School District 2).
It is actually about censorship.
Moms for Liberty and Cromer (along with others who support book challenges and restrictions) frequently argue that their goal is not to stifle the speech of teachers and students— usually with the argument that somehow as long as a book is available on Amazon, it’s okay to remove it from the access of students. (Weaver made this argument explicitly in an address to school librarians this summer, and Carter voiced almost exactly the same talking points during the “barn meeting”.)
However, Cromer was recently quoted as saying,
I have given much thought of [sic] what can be done to stop the grooming and sexualization of our children… Holding school board members accountable for allowing porn in schools, removing the American Library Association as an accreditor for librarians and terminating immediately anyone who is spreading false narrative, i.e. book bans.
(emphasis mine)
In other words, Cromer, in her capacity as a state official, is calling for firing employees because they have expressed an opinion related to a matter of public concern (which is a protected First Amendment right, according to the U.S. Supreme Court). And Cromer’s FOIA stunt has also set up even more direct attacks on Anderson school employees. That, legally, may constitute unconstitutional censorship.
State officials call for firing librarians
Cromer’s fellow Freedom Caucus member Thomas Beach and others have falsely claimed that Cromer’s FOIA request shows a librarian encouraging others to “hide” books from parents, with Beach writing, in an open letter to Superintendent Weaver, that librarians “are crafting methods to keep what they deem suitable pornographic propaganda available to students and/ or staff, yet denying search inquiries by parents.”
In the same letter, Beach called for firing the staff members, based on what amounts to a few sentences, out-of-context, that were included in a blog post that focused, without many specifics on Cromer’s FOIA request.
In fact, the email released as part of Cromer’s FOIA request— provided in full by a person with knowledge of the situation— shows the librarian in question recommending that if books have already been removed from circulation or “weeded” (library-speak for removing books that aren’t being checked out enough to justify shelf space), they should be removed from the online catalog so it doesn’t appear that the schools have books that aren’t actually there.
Though Beach called it a “bombshell report,” Cromer’s FOIA material actually came to light through a blog post, with obvious and extensive cooperation by Cromer, from former Mark Sanford press secretary Will Folks, founder of the news blog FITSNews. (Folks stepped down from the press secretary position after pleading guilty to criminal domestic violence; he later rose to infamy again in SC politics when he used his blog to claim, without evidence, to have engaged in an “inappropriate relationship” with then-gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley. Haley won anyway, perhaps in part due to goodwill generated by Folks’ unsupported claims.)
In keeping with Folks’ general style, and with the overall book ban playbook, the post relies less on evidence than on the suggestion that somewhere out there, there is evidence. It provides a few sentences, often with misleading speculation or opinion mixed in, that allegedly come from the FOIA production, but then relies heavily on the author’s own interpretations, and on on paraphrases of often-unspecified third parties. That this is enough for Beach and Cromer to call for the termination of career public servants is obviously irresponsible, unethical, and possibly defamatory.
For its part, Anderson One Schools declined to comment on the specific blog in which Cromer participated, involving the FOIA request. However, they did share this statement:
It is not our practice to respond to opinion editorials.
Here are some facts about Anderson School District One and parental access to card catalogs.
Anderson School District One works closely with parents to provide a high quality education to all students and aims to reflect the values of the entire community.
The district strives to be transparent with our students, parents and community members and works diligently to address any concerns it receives.
Starting in the 2023-2024 school year, the District required schools to make card catalogs available to all students, parents and the general public. Prior to this school year, each school determined their own settings for logging in.
Parents have always had access to the card catalogs through their child’s login and password. There has never been a time where students, or parents with their child’s login, could not access the card catalog. In addition, if a book is on the shelf in our libraries and accessible to students, it is and has always been visible in the card catalog.
In addition, the district also developed an “opt-out” form for parents who wish to limit their child’s access to certain library books or all library books.
A quick search of the district website and individual school websites confirms that both the library catalog and parental opt-out forms for books are easily accessible to the general public.
It is obvious that neither Beach or Folks reached out to the district, or fact-checked any of the claims made by Cromer or Carter, and neither quoted or cited a single librarian, student, or teacher directly, relying entirely on Cromer and/ or the FOIA production.
Why? The timeline strongly suggests that the purpose of the original blog post was to set up hysterical responses like Representative Beach’s. Cromer (and possibly the Moms-for-Liberty-adjacent Calvary Strategies) filed the requests with specific schools and educators in mind, several of whom had promoted publicly free access to books. This allows elected officials to create self-fulfilling prophecies, which in turn allow them to continue to manufacture outrage in an election year. All at the expense of school staff members who have the audacity to want to encourage students to read more, and who have the nerve to, in the words of the teacher Carly Carter described Facebook stalking, make sure that “students look on my shelf and know that they are represented”.
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In Cromer’s FOIA request, dated 10/18/2023, she requests all records relating to specific librarians mentioned in the blog post, along with a long series of search terms including “CRT,” “oppressed,” and “LGBTQ”. She also requested names and salaries of all employees and volunteers at the school, as well as search terms that included the name of the Anderson County M4L chair, Carly Carter. However, the M4L-affiliated Cavalry Strategies has also claimed that Anderson County Moms for Liberty filed a FOIA request on 10/18/2023. It seems likely that either M4L filed a separate request, or wrote the requests and asked Cromer to put her letterhead on them. Cavalry Strategies. As Peter Greene points out in an excellent recent piece, Calvary Strategies has also represented the national M4L organization.
State law allows districts and other public entities to collect fees from individuals for FOIA requests, but requires production for free to state legislators like Cromer.
Via CNN: “By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content,” Grant wrote. “And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin.”
For further context, 80% of the surrounding city is white, and less than 70% of the total state population is white. (In other words, Clemson would obviously have to encourage more nonwhite students to apply in order to reflect the same diversity as the state, or even the city.) (Source: US Census data.)
The courts recognize an important difference between pornography and texts containing “sexual content”: for example, Romeo and Juliet (which was restricted under a Florida law prohibiting “sexual content” in schools) does not meet any reasonable definition of pornography, though it contains sometimes graphic sexual innuendo. Not incidentally, Representative Cromer appeared at several meetings with Moms for Liberty members, including Carter, championing a book censorship regulation which goes significantly beyond state and federal law in its definition of obscene materials.