Book banners plot a dumber future

The dumbing down of America, one banned book at a time
A majority of Americans are against book bans. That won't stop a well funded, fear-fueled movement

By Andi Zeisler
Senior Writer
Published October 6, 2025 6:30AM (EDT)




(Salon) Amid last week’s parade of proclamations about beardo generals and Navy-vessel aesthetics, there was one announcement that felt wholesomely, uncomplicatedly good: Reading Rainbow is back — at least for a limited time. The award-winning former PBS show, hosted by LeVar Burton from 1983 to 2009, has been rebooted for a four-episode season hosted by California-based librarian Mychal Threets, a Reading Rainbow superfan whose joyful TikTok dispatches have been keeping the show’s spirit alive since he began posting during the pandemic. When a trailer for the show was released, it racked up more than 2 million views.

The show’s return feels like a brief respite from the anti-education storm on which the second Trump administration blew in last January. In the 10 months since, the landscape of public education has already felt its effects in actions like the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s sole federal agency for libraries. Ahead of Banned Book Week (Oct. 5–11), PEN America’s newest report, “Banned in the USA: the normalization of book banning,” confirms that book bans and challenges continue to rise in record numbers — but, more importantly, are coming to feel increasingly inevitable. With a deliberate callback to the era of Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, PEN America asserts that the coordinated, systematic attack on literacy and critical thinking inherent in book bans under Trump 2.0 can be called the “Ed Scare.”

Unlike the American Library Association, which defines a banned book as one that has been “completely removed from a library or school collection due to objections from a person or group,” PEN America’s definition is broader, with the terms “bans” and “challenges” denoting “any action taken against a book based on its content that leads to a previously accessible book” being restricted or removed. Using this measure, the new report counts ​​6,870 books that were banned in the 2024–25 school year, in 23 states and 87 public school districts. That’s actually down a couple thousand from the 2023–24 tally of 10,000 — but the report’s overview remains grim regardless:



As in previous years, the majority of book bans have been enacted in the ban-happy states of Florida (2,304 instances), Texas (1,781 instances) and Tennessee (1,622 instances). The reasons for challenges and bans, too, remain consistent: Among the most frequently challenged books are those that feature characters of color and explorations of race and racism, and those that foreground LGBTQ characters and representation of same-sex attraction and love. And the groups catalyzing the bans, despite often identifying as “grassroots,” are still ones like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, funded by right-wing donors and think tanks wielding copied-and-pasted lists of books to ban in bulk — books that most of their members are unlikely to have actually read, but that they can denounce with hypersensationalized phrases including “pornography” and “critical race theory.” The most frequently banned books include classics like Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” and Judy Blume’s “Forever,” histories like “A Queer History of the United States,” bestsellers with a broad cultural footprint like Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” historical young-adult fiction like Malinda Lo’s “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” and graphic novels like Raina Telgemeier’s “Drama.” ........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/10/06/the-dumbing-down-of-america-one-banned-book-at-a-time/