Picture your favorite teacher or librarian. Maybe this person recommended a book you loved so much as a kid that you now read the story to your own children. Maybe this person offered you the first story that made you feel seen, valued and important.
Now imagine your favorite teacher or librarian in jail because they handed a child a cheerful picture book called Everywhere Babies or Dim Sum for Everyone. Ridiculous? Impossible? Not if Donald Trump and his Project 2025 friends get their way.
Project 2025 is a 900-plus page policy guide vomited up by ghouls at the Heritage Foundation. This guide — packed with plans to turn the U.S. into a violent, Christian-nationalist dystopia — is intended to help Trump become a dictator should he win the presidency. (Trump claims he has nothing to do with Project 2025, though more than 100 former/future Trump staffers worked on the guide and Trump is on video endorsing the plans).
Project 2025 calls to deport 15-20 million people; abolish the Department of Education, the FDA, the EPA, and the Federal Reserve; end the Affordable Care Act; fire 50,000 federal workers; defund the FBI; ban contraceptives and no-fault divorce — and this only scratches the surface.
What Project 2025 also does is redefine pornography.
From Project 2025: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children … has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators.”
What does this mean? It means that in a Trump presidency, that one judgy jerk you avoid at block parties can label any book he doesn’t like as “pornography” or “CRT” and declare anyone who offers that book is a “groomer” or “brain-washer.” Librarians and teachers could be fired, prosecuted and/or forced to register as sex offenders simply for putting books on their shelves.
It’s absurd. It’s anti-American. But because of the very people involved with Project 2025, it’s already happening. Since 2021, book bans have exploded across the country, with thousands of titles and authors targeted. Teachers have been fired and librarians bombarded with rape and death threats. According to Pen America, “Three states have passed laws that would treat librarians as criminals for refusing to pull books from their shelves, and 17 more states are considering … similar legislation.”
What kind of books? Picture books. Classics such as Beloved, Of Mice And Men, Maus, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Odyssey. Books about history, puberty, mental health, science, and grief. Books that feature Black or Brown or Queer characters simply … existing. Ban This Book, a book about book banning? Banned.
Defenders of bans insist that this is about “parents’ right” to decide what their children read. But parents have always had that right. What these shrieking weirdos want is to make the choice for the rest of us. For them, “freedom” means the power to take your freedom away. If their kids aren’t allowed to read a biography of Derek Jeter, then your kids can’t either.
Confession: I’m an author. None of my titles are on these banned book lists (yet.) But I’m not speaking here as an author, I’m speaking as a reader. My first job was in a library. My first loves were books.
I’m also a student of history. My most recent novel is about my mother-in-law’s years in a Chicago orphanage during World War II. My late father-in-law and his brothers fought against the Nazis. In 1933, years before the war began, Nazis organized a mass book-burning during which they burned books by Jewish authors and other books they claimed were “morally corrupt.” Sound familiar? This is what all tyrants do; they ban books before targeting living, breathing people.
They do this because stories are powerful. They make us think and empathize. They teach us about our past and help us imagine a better future. Tyrants, like the wannabe-king Trump and his Project 2025 friends, don’t want us to think or empathize or choose for ourselves.
So on Oct. 19 and beyond, stand with educators, librarians and readers — and stand for your own freedom to read. Buy and request banned books. Attend library and school board meetings, or run for boards yourself. Join free speech organizations. Check your voting registration and vote up and down the ticket. Our country is at the precipice and book bans are the canaries in the coal mines. Let us all be brave enough to heed the warnings.
Laura Ruby is an author, teacher and poet living in River Forest.