“The Librarians” is a 90-minute PBS documentary that aired on national TV this week from the knee-jerk leftists behind the series Independent Lens, about a band of persecuted school librarians fighting “book bans” (wrong), “censorship” (wrong), and fascism (wrong and offensive) in Texas and other states.
Director Kim Snyder made her worldview explicit in a recent MS NOW interview talking about the supposed book-banners, who are not motivated by parental concern over age-appropriate library material, but are actually part of a “well-funded, highly organized effort to take down public education, fueled by a lot of white Christian nationalist, extremist agenda.” Once again, PBS and MS NOW are one and the same. One just pretends to represent the "public."
That “highly organized” idea is a theme of her documentary to discredit what amounts in most all cases to parental concerns over particular books with LGBTQ themes, though the documentary is eager to cast those concerns as emerging Christian theocracy.
PBS first promoted this self-satisfied propaganda on the News Hour in October 2025, when the film was on the “Banned Books Week” circuit in selected cities (Banned Books Week itself being a misleading way to hype non-existent censorship of books in America).
Predictably, Joseph McCarthy made an archive cameo challenging a writer in a congressional hearing.
We heard a lot from a librarian fired for not removing Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nahisi Coates books from the shelves, though we eventually learn that those books (both ridiculous and offensive left-wing totems) were not even “banned” from the library, but instead put behind the counter.
Perhaps most offensive was allowing that same librarian, Suzette Baker, flaunting a U.S. Army Veteran T-shirt for political advantage, to compare concerned American parents to vile Nazis. She read a passage from a speech delivered in May 1933 at a bonfire of Jewish and “un-German” books by Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels
Goebbels himself made an archive appearance presiding over the bonfire, which segued into a book bonfire held in Tennessee in 2022.
In Florida the local hero was Rev. Jeffrey Dove of Clay County, who teared up about the prospect of supposedly erasing black history and delivered a series of proclamations, at school board meetings and in an interview for the documentary, in a segment long on pomposity and stirring background music, but short on facts:
Jeffrey Dove: I'm a strong black man. But when you start talking about removing African American authors and African-American history, I got a problem with that. Because right now we are an embarrassment in the state of Florida….Shame, shame, shame on you. Moms for Liberty are making a lot of ground. Very smart young ladies. I call it wicked genius. It's a genius that curtails [sic] to oppressing people....This can’t be America.”
“The Librarians” used a clip from former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan to bolster its argument about the danger of Moms for Liberty, a conservative group on the forefront of challenging school library books.
In none of these cases are any books actually banned, or even threatened. Amazon.com or a local bookstore will gladly obtain a controversial book for anyone who asks -- although Amazon has actually refused to carry certain conservative books on issues like transgenderism, which is closer to actual censorship than anything that happens in this overwrought documentary. Citations and readings of the most challenged books were suspiciously absent, perhaps because knowing the actual content of the "banned" books would be unhelpful to the cause.
There was some local overreaction documented on the conservative side, but the oppressive righteousness that likened concerned parents to Joseph Goebbels makes one grateful that PBS is no longer receiving taxpayer funding.
Louisiana school librarian Amanda Jones tried dubious-sounding emotional blackmail.
Amanda Jones: I'll be damned if we're gonna lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less. I've had former students reach out to me that have told me books have saved them. And then there's the kids that grew up and killed themselves because they were ostracized in our community for who they are.
Anonymous Librarian asked, under cover of shadow: “Is the agenda to gain power and money, or is it to make our country a Christian theocracy? Or are they one and the same?”
The documentary offensively broadcast family troubles to humiliate the mother of an estranged gay son, letting Weston Brown lacerate his mother Monica in a one-sided character assassination.
Weston Brown: That's my mom, who birthed me, who raised me and fed me and took care of me. Is it some sort of religious psychosis? Years of messaging from extremist pastors and political leaders? 'Cause when I look at my mom, I see someone who absolutely believes what she's saying, and I see someone who looks scared.
There was a cringeworthy, pseudo-dramatic moment at the end when the “Anonymous Librarian” steps out of the shadows to be revealed as Audrey Wilson-Youngblood.
Anonymous Librarian: ….I can't stay anonymous. I can't stay in the shadows anymore. I can't let them keep my story in the dark. I won't be censored. Just like we can't let them keep censoring the stories in our books. What I do know is that our story is still being written... But now it's everyone's story.
Ironically, this shameless documentary ends with graphic of another quote from the library-loving author and legend Ray Bradbury, who was surely far more conservative than the majority of librarians today.
