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Over the last few years, some of our more meaningful (and unfortunately bleakest) reporting has been on the many ways in which the right wing has systematically targeted libraries, schools, authors, and educators over the things they teach, specifically with regard to the teaching of systemic racism, LGBTQ+ issues, science, and sex education. These targeting efforts have led to a widespread, highly successful effort to ban books, restrict curricula, harass and oust teachers and librarians, and broadly censor the educational system. This movement has leveraged these successes to seize power not just in city councils and local school boards but has succeeded in making censorship and “anti wokeness” one of the dominant political ideologies in the United States. We have successfully gained access to public records that show, for example, how a local group in Idaho successfully got a police officer to go hunting for “obscene” books at the public library, the playbook behind getting "Drag Storytime" library events canceled, how superintendents in Florida couldn’t figure out how to comply with the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and have spoken to numerous librarians, scientists, and professors to learn how educational freedom, free access to information, and historic archives are under attack. Today—which happens to be the fourth day of Banned Books Week—we are proud and excited to announce that we will be continuing and ramping up this work over the next year with the help of a grant from our friends and colleagues at government transparency nonprofit Muckrock, with support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. (We’re also excited to partner with Muckrock on this new piece of limited edition merch it made for Banned Books week). From our proposal: “Book banning and educational censorship (the banning of LGBTQIA+ studies, the study of slavery and systemic racism, the war on “DEI” and trans people) has become a political cudgel and core rallying point for the current administration. These bans have been pushed through by organized groups such as Moms for Liberty and high-profile politicians, and impact the daily lives, careers, and future prospects of students, their families, and teachers, while simultaneously managing to become a core part of the culture war. These documents about censorship are themselves difficult to obtain and are at risk of being memory holed and forgotten about without a systematic effort to obtain, publish, and archive them. This project will show how censorship works and will shed light on the sheer scale of these censorship efforts, at a time when public trust in the government is at an all-time low.”
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Over the next few weeks, we will be filing hundreds of public records requests with state, local, and federal governments and school districts with the hope of unearthing more information about the groups, politicians, and monied interests that have been pushing book bans and educational censorship on American public schools and libraries. As we get these documents back over the course of the next few months, we will be making them available to the public through Document Cloud, with the hopes of creating an enduring archive of public records about educational censorship in the United States. We will also, of course, be reporting on the documents we get back and will be turning them into articles that you can read on 404 Media. As always, we will need some help from our readers. We need help deciding what to look for, which school districts and cities to seek public records from, and need leads on where we should point our reporting efforts. During the height of the pandemic, many city councils made their meeting minutes and meeting transcripts searchable, so we have a good sense of the types of organizations and communities that have been most severely affected by educational censorship and book bans, and have a good idea of where to get started. But if you are a librarian, teacher, educator, parent, local politician, or activist who is aware of systemic efforts to ban books, censor curricula, defund libraries, or otherwise attack educational freedom, please let us know by emailing jason@404media.co or by reaching out to Jason securely over Signal at jason.404. And if you want to further support this work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber or by donating to our tip jar.
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