>> PAYTON: Indiana made national news again.

Yay!

♪ Hello and welcome to "Flyover Culture," your guided tour to pop culture in the Midwest.

I'm Payton Whaley coming to you from my local library.

I'm here at this den of iniquity for a very special episode on the greatest mortal danger facing young people today.

Say it with me now... books.

It's books.

Why, is that not what you guessed?

Back in August, the Hamilton East Public Library in Fishers, Indiana, stoked controversy when word got out that it had moved a large number of books previously categorized for teenagers and young adults into its adult section.

Among those, "The Fault in Our Stars," the 2012 John Green novel about two teenagers falling in love in the midst of their fights with cancer.

Safe to say Green was not pleased.

In an open letter to the library board, he wrote: One of his spicier comments even made it on to a shirt from Raygun.

Why they thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with the guy half of Tumblr would have enlisted in the Marines for in 2014, I'm not quite sure.

But after enough attention, the library board put its reshelving effort on pause and returned "The Fault in Our Stars" to the teen section, with Former Library Board President Laura Alerding citing an error in implementing policy.

Said policy that started this whole mess goes back to last year, when the HEPL started moving materials out of its teens zone.

In order for a book to stay in that section, staff members were required to read it cover-to-cover and pay special attention to things like alcohol use, profanity, violence, and sexual content.

These reevaluations and reshelvings took the staff months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As of this July, nearly 1400 books had been reshelved with only 470 remaining in the teen section.

Following the Green controversy, that policy was halted in late August, and Alerding was not reappointed to her position.

And as John Green pointed out after his book was re-categorized, it's unclear what will happen to the other materials moved out of that teen section.

Reps for Green and the HEPL did not respond to an interview request.

While working on this story, I thought, hey, what better time than to finally start reading "The Fault in Our Stars."

And you know what, this book is very tame.

Honestly, the most egregious thing about this book is just how much Hazel is not like the other girls.

>> Oooh, she's different.

>> PAYTON: So if a book like this makes it so high on the priority list, then what's the end goal here?

Like Green said, just because one book was returned to its intended audience, doesn't mean the problem is solved for the hundreds of other reshelved books.

Besides, this isn't about one book in one library in one city.

It's a symptom of what Dr. Howard Rosenbaum calls a frightening trend.

>> What we are looking at in the latest round of these kinds of challenges is perhaps the most organized and well-funded effort that we've ever seen.

>> PAYTON: Dr. Rosenbaum is a professor at the Indiana University Department of Information and Library Science and teaches a course on intellectual freedom.

>> We are looking at the confluence of some pretty powerful forces.

In the political sphere, it's the rise of the populous conservative Republican movement that is attempting to stir up their base with culture war.

We are looking at the rise of social media, which has become an important part of most people's regular daily lives, and we are looking at more organized groups of people who are becoming involved in challenges.

>> Rosenbaum says this recent push can be traced back to 2021 when Former Texas State Representative Matt Krause sent an inquiry to schools around his state to find out whether they had any of around 850 books he had put together on a list.

The titles included books about sexuality, racism, US history.

As Krause put it, anything that, quote: Right wing groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn are picking up the torch, circulating their own lists of books and offering guidance on how to challenge those materials in communities around the country.

>> But according to the American Library Association, and PEN America which track these, in a normal year, there might be between 500 and 600 challenges nationwide.

Now we're looking at 2500.

And 2023 is expected to be even more active.

And 2024 being a presidential election year, probably even more active.

>> PAYTON: Most of these are targeted at school libraries, like Indiana House Bill 1447.

Changed late in the session, and finalized behind closed doors, the bill states that schools must post their library catalogs and have procedures ready to allow parents to challenge objectionable content.

Librarians who distribute materials crossing that blurry line could be charged with a low-level felony and face up to two and a half years in jail.

But public libraries aren't out of the cross-hair either.

In Missouri, a rule went into effect this summer that blocked state funding for libraries if they allow minors to access books labeled as obscene.

A public library in Western Michigan is expected to close in 2025.

Its funding was gutted by voters after controversy around the library stocking LGBTQ-related books.

And in Iowa, Mason City Community School District removed 19 books to comply with the controversial Senate File 496.

19 books recommended by ChatGPT.

Hell is empty, and all the devils are pushing AI bots.

It's a coordinated cultural campaign, and it's having massive effects on school and public libraries.

>> We are seeing a resurgence of an attempt at censorship that our society has gone through many times over.

>> PAYTON: That's Grier Carson, Director of the Monroe County Public Library here in Bloomington.

>> It seems that every time we're in a transitional period as a society, there's an attempt to curtail access to or even just outright censor and in some cases ban particular forms of content.

My suspicion is it's an attempt to control the way people think about things and act, and this sort of larger purpose to bring society together under one banner or another.

Again, this isn't new, but we're seeing an increase in this lately specific to diversity, I think, in our culture.

You know, in terms of the way the American Library Association tracks banned books and challenges, we've seen more in 2022 than we have in the 20 years since the ALA has been tracking it.

>> PAYTON: Okay.

But the books they are banning have to be, like, about serial killers or ice planet barbarians or something, right?

>> Right now, the most common is materials that focus on LGBTQIA+.

There's no question about that.

If you look through the list of the most common banned books from 2022, over 50% of them are about that, a demographic.

Following that, it's People of Color.

It's basically -- and that's why I said before, this is about diversity in our society more than it is anything else.

But at the end of the day, it's kind of boiling down to specific people with specific experiences and saying we don't want those experiences to be shared or understood by other people.

That is very dangerous thinking.

>> PAYTON: These organizations are pushing the message that our local libraries have been caught unawares by a wave of smut seeping through the walls.

But turns out, the kind of reviews they are pushing for have already been done by the librarians with years of training.

>> It's an evolving thing.

It's a living thing.

We go through all of those criteria in making decisions and actually our collection development policy, which is published online for everybody to see, lists all of those criteria and all the thought processes that go behind picking a given title.

It's pretty methodical, and it actually takes our selectors a lot of time to do that work.

It's not throwing a bunch of stuff into an Amazon cart.

We do a lot of comparison.

We do a lot of analysis, and we're very careful, but at the end of the day, it's still more of an art than a science.

>> PAYTON: And if, after all of that, there's still material in someone's library they find offensive, most libraries already have policies in place to address it.

It's just that those discussions don't happen in a board meeting brawl.

They're quiet and personal, uh, boring.

>> It's not hard to challenge a book, and, in fact, we welcome those exchanges.

Again, we have a reconsideration request policy in place with a set of procedures that we follow every single time we get a request.

Okay.

Say you come into the library and say, all right, you've got "Gender Queer" in your young adult collection, and I think that's inappropriate, and I think you ought to do something about it.

Then our staff are going to say, well, talk to me about it.

What are you concerned about?

Let me hear your concerns.

And if it's, I've never read it, but it's all over the media and so I'm gonna say my piece.

Okay.

Well, then that's our opportunity to say, hey, maybe you ought to read it first, because you can't speak to something that you haven't actually read or watched or listened to.

If it's I read it three or four times and I can't believe my public library used my tax dollars to buy this item, okay.

Then we're to the point where you say, you can issue a formal complaint.

>> PAYTON: Which is when the director will put together a committee to critically review the item and get input from the community and professionals to decide what to do next.

Now, again, that's how the Monroe County Public Library does it, but Grier says it's pretty indicative of the way things go around the country.

>> Most public libraries have a policy in place or process in place for reconsideration requests.

What some of the attempts at changing the law are about are to make sure, first and foremost, that all libraries have it if they don't.

And secondly, sometimes to bypass that process and go straight to the board so that it's in the public forum immediately, and so then it becomes political immediately.

>> What librarians are facing now is a person or persons coming in and saying, we're challenging these 120 books, instead of oh, my child has this book and I'm concerned about it.

And that's created a whole different environment for dealing with the issues of banned books.

>> The rub is when you get a campaign that issues a litany of complaints, and they all happen at once, either with a bunch of different titles or with the same title over and over again.

>> One big question I had while working on the story, In an age where books and movies and music are so easily accessible, what kind of power do bans have?

>> One way of answering your question is, yes, sometimes they work and sometimes materials are removed.

In our own state of Indiana, the school librarian could go to jail for two years if he or she were brought up on charges.

And that has a chilling effect, and that leads to self-censorship.

And that's another way that book bans work.

Sometimes the librarians or the staff themselves are going to remove controversial material to avoid the confrontation.

The professional ethics of their careers, if they follow that, they come in direct conflict with the people who are trying to remove these materials.

But they're thinking about states where they just don't want to work because it becomes an untenable situation.

I would say that the states with the most serious and constraining legislation about book bans are probably going to end up staffing their libraries with people who don't have training.

>> PAYTON: So yes, bans can work in the sense that a group wants a book removed and it gets removed.

But even more so, there are long-term psychological effects that these bans have on the children they are meant to protect.

>> If you start banning books or even recataloging books and taking them from one collection to another, you are sending a signal to kids that we are ultimately the arbiters of what we think you ought to be reading and thinking about.

We don't trust you to think for yourself because you are young and your brain is still developing, and so we -- you know, we will keep this away from you.

And I think there are plenty of good arguments for doing that up to a certain point, but when you hit adolescence and you get into that area where some of these really great authors are trying to connect with kids, they're talking about experiences that are real, that other people are having.

And when you say, you shouldn't share that with other kids because they don't understand it yet, I don't think you are giving them credit and you are telling them we don't trust you.

You are not smart stuff.

You are not independent enough to figure this out.

>> So there's a small body of research that's being done by people in schools of education and people in library and information science, in my area, that are looking at the effects that it has on LGBTQ children and Black children, and they're not good.

As these collections get sanitized or if we could use the pun whitewashed, the kids in marginalized and minority populations no longer have any kind of role model that they can see in the literature that they are being asked to read.

And for kids who are LGBTQ, that increases their confusion.

And we know that that's part of what happens to these children as they are growing up, trying to figure out who they are.

And for children in marginalized ethnic populations, it erases their history.

If I can use a big word, in my field we will call that epistemicide, removing a way of knowing for a particular population, and this is being done intentionally.

One of the ways that these laws are being phrased is that you can't have materials that are going to make the majority of children feel uncomfortable about their whiteness or their history.

>> The other thing that strikes as kind of almost ironic about all of this is that it kind of assumes that books are where kids are getting their ideas about the world.

Well, that's ridiculous.

I mean, if you really want to go after this from a cultural, ideological standpoint, then go after big tech, right?

Because that's where the access to actual content that could be controversial and in some cases is just flat out terrible, that's where it exists, and that's where kids are getting that stuff.

Doing it with books is just sort of symbolic, I think, but it is potentially a very, very negative symbol.

>> PAYTON: The groups pushing for these bans have seen plenty of success flexing their ability to remove certain types of books, but with organizations like Moms for Liberty, we're seeing that they have real political power too.

>> The last time they had their convention, which was just a few weeks ago, all of the major candidates showed up, which really tells you something about the kind of abilities that they have to sway political thinking.

>> Parents in this country should be able to send their kids to school, should be able to let 'em watch cartoons or just be kids without having some agenda shoved down their throat.

[ Applause ] >> They are receiving money from right wing foundations.

They are receiving money from right wing billionaires.

They've been able to establish chapters in 33 states.

They now have enough money that they can back political candidates at different levels of state and local elections.

In the last round, in the midterms, as one article put it, 49% of their candidates won.

And that's indication of their power.

>> But it's an interesting question, you know, why are we the easy target?

Because we don't have the litigation support or we don't have the funds to deal with some of these heavy challenges?

It's very, very possible.

What's terrible about it, honestly, is that public libraries are community resources.

Everybody already pays for these things.

So basically, people are battling over what they want their library to be.

And in an abstract sense, I think that's a healthy kind of debate to have, but when you come down to policy, and even more so people's livelihoods, the people who have trained to do this work professionally and you are threatening to change that radically or even take it away in some cases, I think that's really reckless.

Outright banning something should be anathema to anybody who gets into library services.

It's just not what we do.

>> PAYTON: So when challenges like this are so well organized and so well funded, what's a boy to do?

Jump into the glamorous and fast-paced world of community policy.

>> You base everything on your policy.

So the policy is absolutely foundational.

I think cultivating sort of a community awareness about intellectual freedom in public libraries is important.

It's funny, we are politically neutral as an institution and should remain so, with the one exception of when it comes to censorship.

That's what we don't stand for, and we don't accept.

And the American Library Association, the Library Bill of Rights actually outlines that for people, and many public libraries adopt that Library Bill of Rights as a matter of practice.

And you remain apolitical about everything, which can be hard to do because the community wants you to lean one way or another, and if you have five items that are about this, you ought to have five items with an opposing view, and that's that art of developing the collection.

>> One thing to realize is that the -- the people who are -- who are working hard to ban books have probably over a five-year head start on everybody else.

Many people who would be thinking about the opposite side, you know, freedom to read, freedom to think, they didn't really see a threat because this happened very quietly.

To catch up organizationally is going to be really hard, and there doesn't seem to be the same network of liberal billionaires who are ready to start funding organizations to challenge.

If people are trying to push back, they've got to support the library professionals who are going to be at the front-lines of these difficult and challenging encounters.

>> PAYTON: That and if you are a parent concerned about what your kid is checking out at the library, maybe keep an eye on them.

>> Any person can walk into the library and take any materials out that they wish.

So the librarian will not say anything.

All right?

What librarians will say is, hey, parents, watch your children.

If you don't want them to take something out, tell them not to take something out.

It's not our job.

It's your job.

And that message is not getting through at the moment because now parents are saying, I don't care if there are parents who will allow their children to read this material.

I don't want it.

I don't want it in the library, and I don't care.

In many instances that the American Library Association has reported, it's a minority of the community that is the loudest.

And what they are doing is they are banning materials.

They are trying to get materials banned that the majority of the community doesn't have a problem with.

>> PAYTON: Thankfully, there's some areas where people have gotten wise with how to combat these campaigns.

The Michigan State Board of Education voted to stand against book bans as the state library association launched a Right to Read Campaign.

And in Illinois, a bill was signed in June that directs libraries to adopt the ALA's Library Bill of Rights or make their own, and they effectively banned book bans.

>> I don't think any other state in the Midwest is going to pick that up and try to copycat that legislation.

But it was -- it was heartening to see that at least in one state, they are thinking about ways to protect libraries, librarians and library patrons.

>> PAYTON: We know that these challenges are more political theater than protective, but it's still crucial to push back and keep an eye on them, because they can do real damage.

>> I'm concerned for the immediate future and for really the kids who are growing up in an environment where what they are going through, school shootings, they're in a global culture that is increasingly contentious.

There's sort of an unknown about the future of our civilization, all of that stuff, and when you put stuff like censorship in the middle of that, I think it adds to almost like generational anxiety.

And so short-term, I think that's a serious concern.

Long-term, I'm very optimistic.

I do think that this is a passing phase, and libraries try to do that.

We try to take that long arc of history view.

This is about an individual's ability for freedom to go into a public library and access whatever it is they have for them, ask for something that they don't see that they wish they saw, and if they don't like what's next to that item, somebody else might, and do you really want to take that person's freedom away from them?

I don't think most people do.

I think they're concerned with this larger issue of collective morality, and, you know, where our culture is going to go, and at some point you lose control of it.

That's -- that's not the business of individual liberty.

♪ >> PAYTON: Thanks so much for watching, and a special thank you to Dr. Howard Rosenbaum and Grier Carson for sitting down with me.

Thanks for watching, and I will see you next time.