Fascists Oppose Literate People

The Banned Books Week Coalition encourages us to stand up for library staff, students, educators, writers, publishers, and booksellers by “Letting Freedom Read”

The forty-fourth annual Banned Books Week (BBW) takes place October 4 through 10 this year, but given the significant, sustained efforts to restrict what young people can read, Banned Books Week should likely be observed every week. We are living in a time of increased attacks on the free press, free speech, academic freedom, and the rights to read and know. This year’s BBW theme, “Let Books Be: Protect the Freedom to Read,” reflects these concerns.

A recently published five-year report compiled by the American Library Association (ALA), Book Riot, Florida Freedom to Read Project, and the Freedom to Read Project chronicled an explosion of book bans beginning in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The surge was the result of what they called “a full-blown, organized political movement” led by groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Censors have had the most success in Florida and Texas, where state legislatures have passed laws requiring schools to purge their libraries of books that attract complaints from parents. But they have increasingly targeted local school board positions across the country to embed members who advance their censorious policies.

While book challenges were once focused primarily on individual books or authors and were brought by concerned parents or family members acting on their own behalf, the past half-decade shows a shift to sweeping challenges from organized interest groups. These efforts have been successful in red states and beyond, which should alarm anyone who supports the right to read and learn.

According to Betsy Gomez, coordinator of the Banned Books Week Coalition, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom “tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA,” and “713 attempts to censor library materials and services, 487 of which targeted books.” In 2025, the ALA found that “92 percent of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72 percent in 2024” and “less than 3 percent of challenges originated from individual parents.”

Tactics and Targets

Books being yanked off the shelves at schools around the country include a number of acknowledged literary classics such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, usually singled out for their violent or sexual content. But the most challenged books in recent years invariably tell stories about people of color or LGBTQ+ characters.

According to PEN America, public school libraries banned 3,743 unique titles during the 2024–2025 school year. Roughly 44 percent of those titles featured characters identified as people of color. Another 36 percent featured characters identified as LGBTQ+, and some 19 percent of the banned titles dealt with characters depicted as trans or genderqueer. A typical book targeted for featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes is Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a National Book Award-winning young adult novel about two women who fall in love in San Francisco’s Chinatown against the backdrop of the Cold War. According to PEN America, it was banned nineteen times in 2024–25.

Some books have been banned merely for acknowledging that the United States has a past marred by slavery, oppression, and exploitation, or for depicting struggles for social justice. For instance, Veronica Arreola’s J is for Justice: An Activism Alphabet, an illustrated picture book introducing youngsters to social justice activism, was one of nearly 596 titles removed from Department of Defense school libraries earlier this year. It was also removed from a Virginia school library.

Book banning at the K-12 level is bad enough, but increasingly brazen censors are also trying to restrict the sort of books that can be read in college as well. Early this year, Texas A&M University barred a philosophy professor from assigning an excerpt from Plato’s Symposium, his famous dialogue about the nature of love, because it allegedly contained “gender ideology.” The University of Nebraska at Kearney announced in June that it would discontinue the textbook Discovering Human Sexuality in courses after fielding multiple complaints from conservative critics, including Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen. The critics particularly bemoaned a training module in the book about empowering transgender students.

Although most of the book challenges around the country in the past few years have been perpetrated by right-wing groups and politicians, not all the titles being targeted are “progressive” or “woke.” For instance, two books by former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, about Jesus and Ronald Reagan, were removed from shelves in one Florida school district.

These extraordinary efforts to control student access to works about specific academic subjects or marginalized identities are problematic on their own, but a separate challenge exacerbates all of this: declining literacy and interest in reading.

A Decline in Literacy

 

Why Fascists Fear Teachers

Why Fascists Fear Teachers 

by Randi Weingarten

President, AFT

Teachers are under siege not for anything they do wrong, but for what they do right.

An excellent read. (2025)

The title of my new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, is intended as a warning, but it may belie what the book is at its core: a love letter to teachers. I write about teachers’ seemingly small everyday acts, like fostering empathy, confidence, critical thinking and mastery, that cultivate opportunity and humanity in our young people. And I look back at historic acts of heroism, such as the teachers in Norway who were among the first and most resolute to protest the Nazi takeover, even when the Nazis tried to violently force them into submission. When I heard that story many years ago, I would never have believed that echoes of authoritarianism would reverberate in the United States today. Nor could I have imagined that this book would come into the world at a time when heinous acts of political violence are occurring with horrifying frequency, violence that I condemn with every fiber of my being. Yet here we are.

 

Weingarten signing her book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, on Sept. 16 in New York. Photo credit: Mario Jose Ibarra 

I try in this book to answer several questions. Teachers are widely recognized and appreciated for dedicating themselves to helping all children reach their unique potential. So why are there so many attacks on teachers? Why do so many extremist politicians think it’s OK to smear and insult teachers? Why are we seeing the defunding of already strapped schools, the book bans, the censoring of honest history and so many other actions that prevent our children from getting the education they deserve? Why are these actions, which are warning signs of increasing authoritarianism, happening in the United States today?

The answer is that authoritarians fear a well-educated citizenry. They fear what educators do—the teaching of critical thinking, of honest history, of pluralism—because their brand of greed, power and privilege cannot survive in a democracy of diverse, educated citizens. Public education is essential to a free and fair America, and teachers are essential to public education. We’re under siege not for anything we do wrong, but for all the things we do right.

The Founding Fathers believed public education was a bulwark against tyranny. Why Fascists Fear Teachers lays out the plot to undermine public education, which a conservative activist declared outright required his allies to be “ruthless and brutal.”

Extremists are executing that plot with alarming resolve: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed, then criticize them for their shortcomings. Erode trust in public schools by stoking fear and division, including attempting to pit parents against teachers. And replace them with homeschooling and private, religious and online schools. All toward their end goal of destroying public education as we know it, atomizing and balkanizing education in America, bullying the most vulnerable among us and leaving the students with the greatest needs in public schools with the most meager resources.

I tell the stories of teachers who have fought for their students and for the promise of public education. I hope educators will see themselves in its pages. And I hope it will help parents, students, policymakers and everyone invested in our nation’s future understand why teachers and public schools are essential to individual opportunity, our collective prosperity and the survival of our democracy.

That feels especially crucial as the country reels from another horrific political assassination. Political violence is never acceptable. Never. As every living former president has said in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, all Americans must condemn violence and de-escalate the tensions roiling the country. In many ways, teachers can serve as the antidote to them, by helping students navigate this trauma and division and by modeling civil discourse.

No one should condone—and certainly no one should celebrate—violence. But in this highly charged moment, many people are paying a high price for exercising constitutionally protected speech, and some have even been accused of hate speech for decrying hate speech. We must recommit as a nation to the right to express ourselves nonviolently without fear and to resolving disagreements peacefully and civilly.

Ninety percent of America’s young people attend public schools, where educators strive to prepare them with the fundamentals for full and productive lives—with the academic foundation they need, of course, as well as the ability to participate in civic life and to work together across differences. Our public schools are America’s great engine of opportunity. They are where teachers dedicate themselves to providing children of every background an education that is safe, welcoming, relevant and engaging. When we strengthen our public schools and support our children’s teachers, we sustain the American dream and democracy itself.

Download the Column (127.38 KB) 

  

Trump / Fascists to Cancel Voting Rights

 Panic within the Trump White House over their impending demise in the 2026 midterms has reached a fever pitch and they are now pulling out every stop to try to save themselves. 

Last week it was announced that President Trump ordered the US Postal Service to stop mail in voting for every state that does not provide the White House with the state’s list of registered voters. The ban is now moving forward.  However, the fact that they want these voter lists should scare you even more than the cancellation of mail in voting.  The White House is trying to compile these lists so that (1) they can challenge the ballots of every Democrat and ensure their votes don’t count. And (2) so that in the event of civil unrest and or the suspension of habeas corpus, the Department of Homeland Security will have a list of where all registered Democrats live.

The NAACP is challenging the order but unfortunately due to MAGA’s capture of the US Supreme Court, they have us dead to rights.  The US Supreme Court has become the harbinger of American fascism. They must be stopped before they transform our nation into an unrecognizable hellscape.   Though it may be too late to stop the Supreme Court from banning mail in voting, it is not too late to stop the rulings that await in the not so distant future: a national abortion ban, greenlights for mass detentions of Democratic activists and mass killings of undocumented migrants, and so much more.  Terrifyingly, this conservative majority on this court could last until 2065, more than enough time for the far-right to carry out their most depraved desires. That is unless Democrats take unprecedented action to seize the court.  The moment Democrats reclaim power in DC, Democrats can and must move to pack the court with liberal justices to reclaim a majority on the court. We did it under FDR and we can do it again.  Defend our Courts is preparing for exactly this moment. There will be some who claim we need to follow precedent and wait until 2065 to reclaim the majority. It’s on us to steamroll them and ensure everyone does their part to take back this court.  +++++++++++++ This case and others reveal why we will need to use aggressive aactions by States to defend our democracy.  States can act and can resist.  Trump plans to sabotage the midterms, so we're going to need a plan to stop him. As soon as he took office again, Trump started signaling that he intends to interfere with the midterms. There are too many examples to cover everything, so here are some of the lowlights from just the last year: March 2025: An executive order trying to unilaterally overhaul election administration. July 2025: Ordered Texas to gerrymander five new Republican House seats. August 2025: An executive order to "get rid of" mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms. January 2026: Told the House GOP "they should cancel the election.”He regretted not seizing the voting machines after 2020, and then later that month he sent goons to raid Fulton County's election hub. February 2026: Said Republicans should "nationalize" elections. The next day Steve Bannon said, "You're damn right we're gonna have ICE surround the polls come November," and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. March 2026: Issues an executive order to create state-by-state citizen lists and orders USPS to deliver mail ballots only to federally approved names. Installed election denier Dan Bishop to run DOJ's "election-integrity" efforts. April 2026: Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for racial gerrymanders in former Confederate states. Trump team threatens to force blue states to redraw their own maps.  June 2026: Raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voter-registration nonprofit. Even as he meets resistance from the courts and some blue states, he's clearly not backing down. So what's our plan? We need to get into election protection formation -- let’s talk about how. For the last 75 weeks or so, Leah and I have hosted What's the Plan, our live Q&A with the Indivisible movement. It’s a unique space: thousands of people from across the country and the world, together every week, working through the strategy and tactics of organizing against fascism. When we’re at our best, we’re cutting through the noise, demystifying some process or institution, and focusing on what we all can actually do. If Indivisibles are going to plan together for how we organize in defense of the midterms, the place to have that conversation is What’s the Plan. We don’t want to shortchange the big topic, so this week we’re trying something a bit different.

Where Are America's Leaders?

Why Do Fascists Fear Teachers ?

Why Do Fascists Fear Teachers? :  Randi Weingarten 

Because We Want Kids to Think—and Read—for Themselves

When he was still a student at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an essay in the student newspaper titled “The Purpose of Education.”⁵ He argued that education has two main purposes: “the one is utility and the other is culture.” Education helps students develop concrete skills and tools and learn how to use them to achieve their goals in life. But that second purpose King wrote about? That purpose is really democracy. “To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”

“The function of education,” Dr. King went on, “is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.” Critical thinking is vital to accurately understanding societal problems that need to be solved and, together with our civic peers, engaging, analyzing, and innovating as we constantly renew and reinvent our democracy. Critical thinking is the most important muscle in the exercise of democracy. No wonder fascists want to weaken it.

Democracy is being deeply, substantively engaged in the problems and solutions of our society. Which means critical thinking and education are absolutely essential to and intertwined with the practice of democracy. When we think critically, we have our own ideas and opinions, but we simultaneously scrutinize them, weighing other facts and ideas to be as rational as possible. We listen to and really wrestle with ideas and opinions that conflict with our own. And we engage earnestly with people who may think differently from us, exchanging facts and opinions, not taunts and smears.

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.⁶ Fascist leaders may campaign for our votes, but modern democracies more often fall because of autocratic candidates who work within the system to dismantle it, rather than because of coups or military takeovers. Prominent authoritarianism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains that fascist and authoritarian leaders want to “damage or destroy democracy.”⁷ Democracy is people power. But fascists want one leader or a small group of elites to have all the power.

The problem for fascists, then, is that a public with strong critical-thinking muscles is more likely to strengthen democracy and resist authoritarianism. Scholars who study democracy worldwide are incredibly clear on this point: “On the whole, higher levels of education are associated with stronger democracies—a country with an educated populace is more likely to become or remain a democracy.”⁸ Looking at data from Latin American elections, researchers Amy Erica Smith and Mollie J. Cohen found that “The more education you have, the less likely you are to vote for an authoritarian.”⁹ In fact, some global scholars have gone as far as to suggest that “education causes democracy.”¹⁰

So is the opposite true? Yes, history has shown us that. For instance, in 2017, the Financial Times found that among Dutch voters, having attained less education was the greatest predictor of support for the country’s anti-immigrant, far-right political party.¹¹ And after winning a primary election during the 2016 election, Donald Trump bragged how well he did with certain demographics, saying, “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”¹² This may or may not have been just another sloppy aside from Trump, but it does reflect a deeper truth. Donald Trump was able to rise to power, yes, because of his keen political instincts and charisma, but also because he routinely says things he thinks voters want to hear, whether he can actually do anything about them or not.

Authoritarians actively attack truth, knowledge, and critical thinking because an uninformed public is easier to control. Degrading public education and critical-thinking skills may only prime more Americans to not recognize disinformation and misinformation and take authoritarian leaders like Trump at their word. Psychologist Bob Altemeyer studied personality traits that make people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. In his 2006 book The Authoritarians, Altemeyer documented his “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale, writing:

The authoritarian follower makes himself vulnerable to malevolent manipulation by chucking out critical thinking and prudence as the price for maintaining his beliefs. He’s an “easy mark,” custom-built to be snookered. And the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads, to start thinking critically and independently about things.¹³

In other words, those inclined to support authoritarianism exhibit a general avoidance of or allergy to critical thinking. And authoritarians like it that way.

 

 See Also;  Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education.  4th. edition.  201o. Allyn and Bacon.  by Duane Campbell  Used copies on the web very low priced. 

https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2025/weingarten_book?

We are not giving up on American Democracy

We're Not Giving Up On This Democracy

In times of moral crisis, true faith offers courage to stand for what's right

   

 https://open.substack.com/pub/ourmoralmoment/p/were-not-giving-up-on-this-democracy?

 

“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

-Thomas Paine

December 23, 1776.  

First They Came for the Socialists

 First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

 

This quote is attributed to the prominent German pastor Martin Niemöller. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a poem. 

After World War II, Niemöller openly spoke about his own early complicity in Nazism and his eventual change of heart. His powerful words about guilt and responsibility still resonate today.

 

On our blog.

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/first-they-came-for-the-socialists

 

 

 

Trump and Nazis