Zooming Out

What are book bans and censorship really about?

This piece is made available through the support of the ProTruth South Carolina coalition. A full version is available on their website by clicking here.

In 2026, children and young adults are facing some stressors and threats that come once in a generation, and some which have never existed before.

AI-generated misinformation and disinformation. Social media algorithms that are associated with significant mental health challenges. Significant instability in the housing, jobs, and healthcare markets.

And years of instability caused not only by the COVID-19 pandemic, itself, but by the ensuing political bickering over masks, books, and “ideology” in schools, with the accompanying reactionary politics, threats against educators, and intensifying divisiveness.

It seems extremely unlikely that the average person, in a moment of sober reflection, really believes that books and materials selected by school librarians and teachers rank anywhere near top of the list when it comes to these current threats against children. So what is really going on here?

For one thing, the fixation on the “problem” of physically-available books ignores that children, like adults, get the vast majority of their content— good and bad— from online sources, whether they’re at home or at school.

According to NPR, by 2019 over half of children in America already owned a smartphone by age 11. The percentage in 2026 is probably considerably higher. Even with parental controls, in my experience children and young adults are very good at using VPNs (virtual private networks) and other work-arounds (not to mention other kids’ phones) to access anything the internet has to offer.

Obviously, this includes virtually any book ever written, whether from legal resources like public libraries, public domain resources like Project Gutenberg, or freely-available pirated PDFs.

But most kids are probably not illicitly accessing books online. As a former high school English teacher, I would venture to say that’s actually wishful thinking.

I would love to believe that most young people are desperately seeking out things to read.

But according to PEW research, “The shares of American 9- and 13-year-olds who say they read for fun on an almost daily basis have dropped from nearly a decade ago and are at the lowest levels since at least the mid-1980s, according to a survey conducted in late 2019 and early 2020 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)”.

A full version is available on the ProTruth South Carolina website by clicking here.

A wealth of research (as well as common sense and the experiences of millions of parents and educators) tells us that reading independently is important for children and young adults, that it helps them academically, developmentally, and socially.

In other words, clearly children not reading enough is a far more significant problem than children reading the “wrong” books (which, in the conspiratorial narrative of book banners, are being given to them by the “wrong” kinds of people).

Instead, the much more plausible dangers to children and young adults online come from online predators, from disinformation campaigns, from targeted advertising and invasive data collection.

So why did organizations like Moms for Liberty, the Freedom Caucus, and the Heritage Foundation spend the past half-decade fixated on the unholy evils of books in school, only occasionally addressing these more serious issues?

For one thing, it’s easy.

Library catalogs, unlike children’s search histories, are publicly available.

Most books in schools, including textbooks, library books, and even many classroom sets, are purchased with public funds. It’s easy to jump online and find out almost everything there is to know about which books are in schools and classrooms. And because they are (rightly) answerable to the public, school board members, school administrators, and educators (unlike the media and social media companies and online content creators who provide most children with the vast majority of the content them consume) are easy targets for complaints.

This has made it easy for groups like Moms for Liberty to attack school board members, to dox teachers and librarians, and to disrupt schools and school board meetings.

For another thing, it’s tradition.

Reactionary political movements often lean hard into real or imagined traditions, and book-banning is an old one.

Historian Jason Stanley writes, in How Fascism Works, “Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed… In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme…”

While most supporters of banning books from schools and local libraries are certainly not anything close to fascists— and while many are sincerely concerned about the dangers they have been told are coming from schools and books— the larger campaigns against books often evoke this idea that tradition and the family unit are being undermined by the presence of books or ideas that make some families uncomfortable.

One of the first things the Nazi party did was ban, burn, and censor books.

In a major book-burning campaign by the Nazis beginning in 1933, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, targeted books included “books by Jewish authors; pacifist works that criticized war; and works praising or promoting leftist political movements, such as socialism and communism.”

“Students and members of the SA unload materials for book burning.” Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This campaign has obvious echoes in the most recent US book banning campaigns, which have targeted minority groups (particularly books about Black and LGBTQ+ experiences), in favor of “patriotic” materials, while explicitly attacking and censoring “leftist” political thought.

When groups like Moms for Liberty promote “American values,” they do so in the context of explicitly attacking LGBTQ+ people and calling for the censorship of many books about antiracism, the experiences of minorities, and other issues.

For example, South Carolina Superintendent of Ellen Weaver attended Moms for Liberty’s 2023 summer conference, where she made a transphobic joke, and where she and multiple others (including controversial former Oklahoma Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters and former SC governor Nikki Haley) villainized the political left.

At one point during the conference, Weaver painted the “woke left” as indoctrinators trying to capture the “hearts and minds of children”.

Weaver subsequently partnered with the partisan “infotainment” group PragerU, which provides videos targeted at school children which are often factually incorrect and which reflect a “patriotic” (nationalistic), anti-Civil Rights, religiously exclusive mindset.

Screenshot from the Moms for Liberty national website, asking for donations to support “books that teach civics, history, and American values” for school libraries.

Similarly, in the 1960s, politicians reacting negatively to the Civil Rights movement often targeted schools, colleges, and books as a proxy for going after the goals of the movement, which were often hard to dispute as the public became more and more aware of police brutality, the disenfranchisement of Black people, and state violence against Civil Rights groups.

And a fixation on banning books provides the emotional appeal that fuels the “grassroots” portion of many well-funded national campaigns.

It is well-documented by now that organizations that gained stature in the pandemic as “non-partisan” and/ or “grassroots” movements are often, in fact, well-funded and connected to partisan political organizations.

Moms for Liberty’s leaders claimed early on to make their money from selling T-shirts. In fact, they had deep connections to the Florida and national GOP, and were receiving millions in donations from deep-pocketed political organizations like Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025). At its height, the national organization hosted nearly every GOP presidential candidate and a host of Republican state officials.

While Moms for Liberty made headlines by pushing for book bans, they clearly intended to shape American politics and policy to partisan ends.

Similarly, state Freedom Caucuses, which have pushed many state censorship efforts at the legislative level, are connected to, and probably coordinated and funded by, the national Freedom Caucus Network, whose clearest goal is getting far-right officials in office.

Because of the convenience and long history of book-banning as a reactionary cause, it allows organizations like these to excite and anger people who wouldn’t normally attend school board meetings, get involved in politics, or— crucially— support and donate to partisan political organizations.

What do they really want?

It’s not better libraries or better public schools. It’s not protecting students from harmful content. And it’s probably not really even having the “right” books.

Simply put, book bans mostly benefit organizations that push school vouchers.

As historian Rick Perlstein writes in his book Nixonland, “The head of the nation’s leading association private schools released a statement [in 1966] worrying that ‘students have adopted ‘terrifying’ attitudes toward sex… for lack of a moral code.”

Presumably the solution to this supposed problem of immorality was the private school.

Proponents of spending public funds on private schools have a clear vested interest in criticizing public schools. (For example, Superintendent Weaver’s job immediately prior to taking office was a pro-voucher thinktank, Palmetto Promise Institute, that has regularly painted the state’s schools as “failing” and promoted school vouchers as the cure. Weaver is so enthusiastic about “unbundling” by offering public funding for private educational services that even pro-voucher state senators have been angered at her approach to using the funds.)

Americans by and large do not buy most arguments for private schools that do not rely on the idea that students are being deprived of a good education because their public schools are irredeemably bad.

Education expert Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of Education Wars, told me, in reference to Weaver’s efforts to make it harder for students in South Carolina to access AP African American Studies, that the goal was “purely political. So few people are going to take that class. That’s just meant to gin up the base… It’s meant to make people mad, it’s meant to gin up the liberals and the base.”

When your product isn’t that great— and in this case, the main product is a government subsidy for sending kids to private schools that will predominately be used by people who already send their kids to private schools, or homeschool them— attacking the competing “product”— in this case a constitutionally-guaranteed public system of schools for the benefit of the whole state— is a compelling strategy.

There are also people who really believe that books are corrupting kids. I met many of them attending school board and state board of education meetings over the past several years. But I would argue that even those true believers are basing their concerns on an emotionally-compelling falsehood.

There are real problems facing children in America and throughout the world. Having easy access to books chosen by content experts and teachers is not one of them.