“The Librarians”: PBS Airs a Powerful Documentary about Librarians on the Front Lines of the Culture Wars

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Monday, February 9 PBS aired a powerful and unflinching 2025 documentary called The Librarians, about how librarians are being dragged into the culture wars being waged by an ascendant radical Right (it’s really a perversion of language to call these people “conservative” when their political, cultural, social, and moral ambitions are anything but “conservative”). Their ultimate goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy, and one of their immediate goals is to eliminate any opinions they disagree with from public discourse, including critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder in collaboration with Janique L. Robillard, Maria Cuomo Cole, and Jana Edelbaum, tells the story of how librarians across the country, especially (though not exclusively) in Southern states, have essentially been drafted into the culture war. They’ve been torn between the ethics of their profession, which among other things call them to oppose censoring the content of their libraries simply because other people don’t like certain books; and the increasingly vociferous demands of organizations like the well-funded, powerful nationwide group “Moms for Liberty” which demanded that school libraries in particular censor books with anti-racist or Queer themes.

Moms for Liberty was founded on New Year’s Day 2021 by three Right-wing activists in Florida. They were originally opposed to mask requirements instituted in 2020 to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but their agenda soon broadened to include running candidates for local school boards who were pledged to support their racist, anti-Queer agenda. In 2022 their campaigns were successful in 11 Texas school districts, including one in a town called Granbury that became a major focus of the film.

The campaign was started by a Texas state legislator called Matt Krause, who in October 2021 released a list of 850 books he wanted banned from Texas public school libraries. Krause also said his list was not all-inclusive and he reserved the right to add future titles. Krause explained that the books he wanted removed from state school libraries were ones which “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That seemingly unexceptional statement is actually radical-Right code-speak for anything which “might make white people uncomfortable by pointing out that the U.S. built its prosperity on the backs of enslaved Africans.” (For more information see https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books.)

Krause included with his blacklist a demand that the Texas Education Agency and school districts throughout the state asking each individual he sent it to whether their schools had any of the books on his list. He also asked for a detailed accounting of where the books were and how much money had been spent on them. Among the books cited by Krause and other would-be Texas censors were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Peggy J. Parks’s How Prevalent Is Racism in Our Society?, a picture book put out by Amnesty International illustrating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and novels like Tim Federle’s The Great American Whatever, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, and “Pink Is a Girl’s Color” … and other silly things people say, a children’s picture book by Stacy and Erik Drageset.

One of the key people involved in the radical-Right takeover was successful school board candidate Courtney Gore. She was a prominent activist in the area with solid Right-wing credentials. After the school district removed 130 books from school libraries on grounds they were “pornographic,” Gore did something unusual for someone with her background. Instead of meekly going along with the pressure from her colleagues and funders to ban whole lists of books as “pornographic,” she actually read them and realized they weren’t pornographic at all. Though Gore maintains that she still considers herself a “conservative,” she posted on Facebook in May 2022 that “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy B.S. I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

Another quirky story told in the documentary concerns Granbury parent Monica Brown, one of the leaders of the book-banning movement. What made her story unusual is that the oldest of her nine children, son Weston Brown, is Gay. When he came out to her at age 23, she immediately and irrevocably banned him from any Thanksgiving dinners and other family functions. Weston ultimately moved to San Diego, found a partner named Andrew, and agreed not to have anything to do with the birth family that had raised him, homeschooled him, and kept him as insulated as they could from any intimation either that Queer people existed or he might be one.

Then he saw Monica Brown testifying before the Granbury school board on a social-media video that had gone viral. “It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Brown told NBC News. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.” The Librarians includes a scene in which Weston Brown spoke to the Granbury school board and pleaded with them not to ban Queer-affirming books like the one he says turned him around, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.

"It’s been nearly five years since I came out to my family,” Weston Brown told the Granbury school board. “I'm not allowed to join in family celebrations or holidays, or be part of my eight siblings' lives, all because I’m not straight. I’m here to implore you to listen to librarians, educators and students, not those speaking from a religious perspective or at the bidding of a political group. If you choose to marginalize differences and remove representation, you will only cause harm.” Monica Brown immediately followed her disowned son to the podium and spewed the usual radical-Right nonsense. She ignored everything her son had said and didn’t have anything to do with him – until the meeting ended. Then, as Weston was being interviewed by a reporter in the parking lot, she walked up to him and started filming the interview herself with her cell phone.

As I’ve noted in previous posts about the American radical Right and its position on Queer issues, one thing most pro-Queer people don’t understand about the radical Right is that it doesn’t believe in the existence of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. They believe we are all naturally heterosexual and cisgender, and any people who express themselves as homosexual or Transgender are either deliberately rebelling against God or suffering from “trauma-induced sexual sin.” Weston Brown recalls that when he came out to his parents as Gay, “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” This is the ideology behind so-called “reparative therapy,” the various attempts to “cure” Queer or Trans people from their “trauma-induced sexual sin” and turn them into cisgender heterosexuals.

One thing we’ve learned about the radical Right since its political ascendancy, which predated the Presidencies of Donald Trump but was kicked into high gear by the Trump phenomenon, is the thug-like way they go after their enemies, especially ones like Courtney Gore who were formerly on their side. Gore reported receiving death threats. So did Amanda Jones, a 20-year veteran librarian in Louisiana who in 2021 won the School Librarian of the Year award from School Library Journal. The award was in recognition of an innovative program she devised during the COVID-19 lockdown. She reasoned that as long as students couldn’t go to the outside world, she would use computer technology to bring the world to them by presenting virtual tours of other countries.

Then in 2022 Jones ran afoul of the would-be book banners. In July 2022 she spoke publicly against censorship at a meeting of the Livingston Parish Public Library Board. (In Louisiana, counties are called “parishes.”) As a result, she got viciously attacked by various organizations, including Citizens for a New Louisiana and Bayou State of Mind. Bayou State of Mind accused Jones of "advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Citizens for a New Louisiana put out a leaflet showing a photo of Jones inside a red circle with a white border, and captioned it, “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section?” She was, of course, doing no such thing, as any member of these organizations who’d actually read the books in question the way Courtney Gore did in Granbury, Texas would have found out.

Since then Jones, who is still a librarian at the same school in Louisiana she attended as a child, has published a memoir called That Librarian detailing her struggle against book-banning and the attempts of the radical Right to turn librarians into censors. She still gets awards, but now they have names like the Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the Louisiana Library Association’s Alex Allain Intellectual Freedom Award. When Jones was honored at the National Book Awards in 2023, Oprah Winfrey said, “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read ... but she's not stopped fighting against book bans, or stopped advocating for access to diverse stories.”

Librarians, especially in schools, have become one of our principal lines of defense against the Radical Right’s depressingly successful campaign to end America’s experiment in self-governance and make the U.S. a neofascist dictatorship. They already control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have organized at the state and local levels in ways progressives can barely dream about. They want a world in which Blacks are once again in the back of the bus, women are once again stuck in the kitchen, Queers are still in the closet, Fundamentalist Christianity becomes a state religion, and giant corporations are able to extract maximum surplus value from their workers without any nonsense about health, safety, or decent pay.

The Librarians is a chilling account of how a handful of individuals are courageously fighting an often lonely battle to maintain and expand America’s and Americans’ freedoms in the face of a well-organized, well-funded campaign to destroy them. It deserves to be seen by every American who wants this country to remain a democratic, secular republic.