One of the many efforts to crack down on free speech is to crack down on book availability. The Trump administration has made moves to bolster that effort.
When discussing internet and free speech, it is often compared to libraries. Indeed, the internet has well and truly become the biggest repository of human knowledge in existence. Where the comparison begins is the constant efforts to burn it all to the ground. Specifically, it’s the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. The destruction of human knowledge is frequently seen by most as a disaster for the empowerment of humanity and the burning of libraries is often seen as a tragic moment.
Yet, when it comes to efforts to attack the internet, there have been those who rightly compare it to efforts to burn down the greatest library to ever exist. More tragic than the efforts existing in the first place is the tragedy that these efforts are frequently seen as a noble cause by members of the upper class, government, and the mainstream media. This leaves people such as ourselves to criticize the efforts to shut down access to knowledge and point out the follies of such activities.
Of course, in recent years, the metaphor of burning down the greatest library in human existence has become less and less of a metaphor and more and more of a very real thing. States like Alabama have been trying to crack down on actual physical libraries for some time. The efforts are an effort to crack down on material that right wing extremists don’t like. This includes books touching on subjects such as the LGBTQ+ community among other things. Last year, we covered efforts by the Alabama government to jail librarians for allowing the “wrong” books to be available to the public.
On a similar note, we also noted the efforts by the publishing community to declare public libraries to be nothing more than a tool for piracy. Shockingly, the narrative that libraries are just piracy was held up by the US Second Circuit Court. So, access to knowledge has been faced with multiple threats for some time now.
All of this was happening before Trump took office. Now that Trump is in office, he is doing everything he can to bolster the efforts to crack down on this analogue expression. From TechDirt:
This, as reported by ABC News, is just another one of things that are going to be commonplace for at least the next four years, if not longer so long as enough members of the American public prefer the warm touch of a boot heel on their neck, rather than be forced to treat other human beings like… human beings.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has announced that it is rescinding all past guidance issued against the removal of books and will no longer employ a coordinator to investigate instances of unlawful book removals.
The department also announced that it has dismissed 11 book ban complaints and six pending complaints. According to the DOE, the complaints alleged that the removal of these books “created a hostile environment for students.”
We like to think federal departments and agencies serve the people. But, ultimately, they don’t. They serve whoever’s currently in charge. Most incoming presidents won’t drastically re-design federal entities in their own image, at least not immediately. Others will do it just because they can’t stomach the notion of anything but abject fealty.
This is what Trump, his cabinet, and his supporters want: a heckler’s veto they can deploy at will to silence people they don’t believe should be treated as equals. It has nothing to do with “protecting” children from content. It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with this, either.
The Trump administration’s Department of Education states that the books were targeted because school districts and parents “have established commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials.”
The statement continued, “Because this is a question of parental and community judgment, not civil rights, OCR has no role in these matters.”
Trump wouldn’t be handing this over to parents if he didn’t believe only the parents who think like he thinks will do everything they can to restrict the content everyone has access to, not just their own kids. And the only word with any meaning in the phrase “parental and community judgment” is “judgment.” Whatever this small, but very active, minority decides to judge as unworthy of public access will be banished from public libraries under the guise of saving kids from “age-inappropriate” content.
This is an insult to true American values, as well as an insult to the communities that are going to suffer from the Dept. of Education’s decision to let neighborhood fascists decide what content is publicly-accessible. Not only will they suffer from the loss of access, but they’ll have to open their wallets to fund defense of unconstitutional laws and book removals — acts performed against their best interests by the people they’ve elected and appointed to serve their interests.
If you think the Trump administrations war on free speech is tied exclusively to the digital world, think again. For right wing extremists, the efforts to protect speech ends where the speech starts venturing into things they disagree with. After that, the war on free speech begins. This latest effort is a perfect example of how this speech crackdown is carried out in the analogue world just as much as it gets carried out in the digital world.
