The Emmy Awards just produced an unusual winner: The library industry. The Librarians, a documentary about fighting “book bans” across America, was awarded in documentary filmmaking and for the “compelling power of storytelling.”
If only that story were true. The Librarians is not an investigation of school collections — it is a permission slip for sexual content at school.
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After the documentary’s PBS premiere, director Kim A. Snyder said she wanted viewers “both outraged and activated to get civically engaged,” and that librarian organizations should be treated as “the firewall protecting one of the most fundamental rights in our democracy.” Featured librarian Amanda Jones claimed the screenings had started “a movement.”
Outrage at parents. Activation onto boards. A firewall between the shelf and the people who pay for it. That is recruitment, not inquiry.
In 1953, at Dartmouth College, Dwight Eisenhower said: “Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship” (emphasis added). The film’s spoken version dies at “read every book.”
True words, false impression. Librarians may be gaslighting parents about “the right to read,” and the scourge of “book bans,” but the school-library fight is about that carved-out category for minors. Using Eisenhower while muting the clause that names the parents’ claim turns a president into a prop.
For most of the film’s 92 minutes, the main voice is an anonymous Texas librarian. Later on, the caption flips to Audrey Wilson-Youngblood from Fort Worth, Texas. “Now it’s everyone’s story,” she says. They had her name the whole time. The last 30 seconds are the ask.
Parents appear as three-minute board speakers. A school library sits within compulsory schooling, serves minors, and is funded by the people the film calls “censors”. Nazi montages do the rest, when in truth, challenge forms and age-gating are not book burning.
Martha Hickson, the New Jersey librarian who midwifed the Freedom to Read Act, says she would have answered an assemblywoman who called a penis inappropriate for fifth grade by reminding her that fifth graders have penises. The fight was about sexual content on a school shelf, not anatomy. The film will not put the specific pages on screen because the game is to gaslight.
The Librarians also won’t tell viewers that the American Library Association’s then-president, Emily Drabinski, used Hickson as the exhibit in a March 2024 members-only town hall. When Hickson was challenged, Unite Against Book Bans, an initiative of the ALA, and “other forms of organizing” produced 400 people.
“What we can do is provide the tools,” Drabinski said. Hickson’s line in the film is that parental objectors to ALA-peddled pornography are “not organic.”
Sitting next to UABB is EveryLibrary, the 501(c)(4) PAC founded by John Chrastka, the ALA’s former membership director. An ALA board paper claims the PAC should “complement” Advocacy and Chapter Relations. Chrastka told Publishers Weekly a local anti-parent campaign needs “about $1,000 for materials and signs.” In January, he called EveryLibrary the “digital, fundraising, and financial backbone” for state groups — it can get a website “up in six hours.”
EveryLibrary launched “Read. Lead. RUN!” to put “library champions” on library and school boards. The companion 501(c)(3) took a $600,000 Mellon general-operating grant and says it builds tools “for the activities of” the PAC. But, apparently, the library industry’s anti-parental push is purely “organic.”
In today’s America, The Librarians can win Hollywood awards while a pro-parent, anti-porn film struggles to exist. Fortunately, some parent groups exist. But they are not Mellon plus a PAC plus PBS plus an Emmy jury built for impact.
Maia Poet has admitted, “I was 12 years old, struggling to accept I was gay. My school library didn’t help me — it pushed me to believe I was a boy.” An honest film would have sat her across from Hickson and Jones. A recruitment film cannot.
Jones is not a mystery witness. In 2021, on the School Librarians United podcast, she claimed her community was “not modern,” “still back in the ’50s.” She “couldn’t outright say, “This is what I’m teaching,” so she fought to “infuse some social justice … without outright teaching social justice, if you read between the lines.” A “modern school librarian,” she said, “pushes … social justice.” In her words, she could not “outright teach” harassment and consent in fifth grade, “even though it needs to be taught,” but she could encourage Maybe He Just Likes You and let the child report what the book taught about unwanted sexual touching.
GAL GADOT OUTRUNS HER CRITICS IN ‘THE RUNNER’
That is Jones training other librarians. The Librarians is that script with a score. A school library is a room inside a school. If the ethic is “we know what the kids need, and we will not say it outright,” handing the room to that ethic is not neutrality — it is disrespectful to parents and outright dangerous for kids.
Watch The Librarians for yourself. Read the sentences they cut. Listen to Amanda Jones in 2021. Then get on the board yourself, and protect our kids from the library-industrial complex.
Dan Kleinman is the owner of SafeLibraries educational services. He is also executive director of the World Library Association, an alternative to the American Library Association.