‘The Librarians’ Traces the Battle of a Lifetime

Many of the scenes in Kim A. Snyder’s new documentary The Librarians are chin-droppers: there are MAGA hat-wearing men brandishing guns in school board meetings and a young gay man confronting the right-wing activist mother who abandoned him. But perhaps the most staggering is the opening sequence when an anonymous woman, silhouetted in a dark room, talks about never believing that her profession would come under violent attack. Yet here it is.

It’s 2025 and the book burners are back. Along with a form of neo-McCarthyism that is tantamount to a witch hunt.

Anyone who reads history knows who is usually behind book burning. The film illustrates this bluntly by pairing footage of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels leading university students in burning thousands of books in Berlin in May 1933, followed by a more recent example of a pastor leading a book burning in the Nashville suburb of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee in February 2022.

Although Snyder’s film takes place in the U.S. (primarily Texas and Florida), there are implications for Canadians. Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale was amongst the more than 850 books pulled from library shelves in Texas on the basis that they posed a threat to sensitive young minds.

In the film, Atwood joins a long list of writers banned from Texas libraries including George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Alice Waters and Salman Rushdie. Even the illustrated edition of The Diary of Anne Frank and Art Spiegelman’s celebrated graphic novel Maus were on the list. “They’re not banning just any books, they’re banning the best books,” one woman notes in the film. To illustrate her point, Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is depicted in the documentary vanishing word by word, until there is nothing left.

As more than one librarian interviewed in the film points out, the most frequently targeted authors on the banned book list are people of colour and other marginalized groups. The books themselves often deal with LGBTQ2S+ issues, race, history and politics.

In Granbury, Texas, at a school district meeting in 2022, 12 librarians were summoned to a closed-door meeting and told that any book that contained information about sexuality or same-sex content was going to be pulled from shelves. One woman refused to pull books like A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, an illustrated children’s book about a pair of same-sex rabbits who decide to get married.

The librarians at the centre of the storm are largely middle-aged women who put their professional and personal lives on the line to keep books on the shelves and maintain access to information.

The film shows it’s not really about the books; it is about power. If you can control the flow of information and ideas, you can control culture. “So, of course you’re coming after school librarians,” one interviewee notes in the film. “Of course you are.”

In the film, an indictment of ‘parental rights’

The bizarre idea that librarians are somehow secret pornography peddlers or covert pedophiles became the nightmare fuel used by right-wing organizations like Moms for Liberty, who took the idea of book bans nationwide in the U.S.

Moms has a Canadian chapter, and there are many similar organizations that are active here. Parental rights activism picked up speed during the COVID-19 pandemic with anti-mask mandates before focusing on the supposed threat posed by school libraries.

It wasn’t long before threats of violence and death, largely aimed at middle-aged women, erupted. The film depicts how security became a major concern at library conference events and school board meetings, with threats to the physical safety of the librarians and their families.

The blown-out dye-jobs popular among the membership of Moms for Liberty are bad enough, but the real horror show in Snyder’s documentary is an evangelical mother of eight named Monica Brown. She crusades against what she perceives to be a moral threat in the education system. She homeschools her eight children and abandoned her son Weston when he came out to his family in 2018.

If things were intense in Texas, they were positively bananas in Florida, where the HB 1467 Law (launched in 2023) asserted that teachers could be charged with a felony if books containing race-based teaching or sexuality were used in classrooms. In elementary schools, books were either removed entirely or covered with paper, much to the horror of both students and teachers.

In Clay County, Florida, things became even more heated as parents threatened to remove more than 3,600 books, with publications about Black history coming under special attack. This in a community where, as one resident explains, the streets still bear the names of slave owners. Footage of school board meetings with Christian activists calling down the wrath of God on school librarians, harried parents and seemingly bewildered board members further indicate the level of chaos.

The documentary depicts how any librarian who asked questions about what was happening was threatened with removal from their job, and even the most beloved and acclaimed professionals were under threat. Amanda Jones, awarded the American Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the American Library Association’s Paul Howard Award for Courage in 2023, was accused of promoting erotica and pornography to children, and received death threats.

As a consequence, Jones was forced to limit her participation in everyday activities from grocery shopping to socialization in her own hometown.

Who stands to lose when books are pulled from shelves?

As the film makes explicit, book banning is nothing new in the U.S. A landmark book censorship case was 1982’s Island Trees School District v. Pico by Pico, which sharply curbed how books could be removed from school libraries.

In the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional High School District in New Jersey, librarian Martha Hickson came under attack for saying that she had enjoyed reading Jonathan Evison’s novel Lawn Boy, a book that contained same-sex content. Despite decades in her profession, Hickson was called a pedophile and groomer of children by parents at a school board meeting while her colleagues and boss watched in silence.

As Hickson discovered, her library was the target of an organized campaign by Moms for Liberty, an extremely well-funded parental rights group that has attracted the likes of Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, as well as deep-pocketed donors like Julie Fancelli, one of the wealthiest supporters of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.

But as Hickson notes, when they’re going after books, what they’re really coming after are the kids who look to the library as a safe space.

In Keller, Texas, 20 of the district’s 40 librarians were either fired or forced to leave their positions in 2022 when books about gender identity were banned, and school boards were targeted by organizations like Patriot Mobile Action.

Patriot put the money behind initiatives like papering the community with flyers that featured images of terrified children and lurking predators. At the centre of large-scale coordinated campaigns was an effort to elect candidates who espoused right-wing Christian ideology.

‘A spiritual war, not a political war’

The documentary features a news clip with American media executive Steve Bannon explaining that school boards were the key to pick the lock to wholesale change — this can be read as a strategy from the right to take control of public education and impose a Christian theocracy in the U.S.

Controlling access to information is at the root of everything, but money is another element. The film makes the connections between information access and Christian nationalism in its discussion of oil baron and pastor Farris Wilks, whose views on sexuality were derived from Evangelical teaching. As one proponent explains in the film, “This is a spiritual war, not a political war.”

Librarians are the canaries in the coal mine, both in the U.S. and Canada, as Mel Woods’ recent investigation published by the Walrus and Xtra Magazine made clear.

Book bans are about education and socialization, and they create a pathway for the right to assert political power. Woods’ investigation pays particular attention to Action4Canada, an organization that, as they describe it, “has deep ties to many hate-group-adjacent movements, including the Freedom Convoy, anti-vax campaigns and anti-LGBTQ2S+ advocacy. Representatives from the group have sued the provincial government over vaccine mandates, protested drag queen story hours and equated sex education resources, including those relating to consent, with child sex trafficking.”

While books containing depictions of sexuality were most often cited as those that came under attack, history and politics were also on the docket.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopic vision in the 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 comes eerily close to documentary when viewed through the lens of The Librarians. School libraries have become a battleground for political warfare in the U.S., but the people who are most harmed by these developments are kids.

As a group of gender diverse teens in Texas explains in the film, books save lives. Many kids who are looking for acceptance and understanding find it in the pages of a book.

In recent school board elections, candidates from Moms for Liberty and similar organizations are still waging war and winning elections.

Librarians have moved from being stewards of information and knowledge to vanguard fighters in the culture wars.

As one librarian states in the film, it is “the civil rights fight of our time.”

‘The Librarians’ is screening at the VIFF Centre in Vancouver until Nov. 22.