July 25, 2024, 10:20am

If you’ve been following political news, you’ve likely heard about Project 2025, the massive conservative “wish list for a Trump presidency.” The 900-page document is a blueprint for an authoritarian, Christian nationalist America, created by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that has influenced many of America’s most regressive and conservative policies since the Nixon administration.

Project 2025 is pitching a horrifying vision of America and American government. BBC’s succinct explainer breaks down the Project’s more eye-popping proposals, including “expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and more.”

What does this document have to say about books? Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author and a co-founder of Authors Against Book Bans, shared some of the Project’s extreme proposals on Bluesky.

We made some quick explainers on Project 2025’s impact on bookbans for Authors Against Book Bans– please feel free to share with your own networks.

— Maggie Tokuda-Hall (@maggietokudahall.bsky.social) 2024-07-18T16:38:59.116Z

Authors Against Book Bans single out a shocking line from early in Project 2025’s manifesto:

“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 and misogynistic exploiters of women.”

And breaks down what this would mean in practice:

“Translation: All LGBTQ+ content will be regarded as pornography. This is already the pernicious lie being used to ban books all over the nation. First Amendment rights will not apply, meaning we will no longer have freedom of speech to protect us.”

When reached by Lit Hub for comment, Tokuda-Hall, on behalf of Authors Against Book Bans, expanded on the implications of these proposals, and how the agenda underlying them is already being rolled out:

Project 2025 is the single most expansive, extreme attack on our freedom to read that we’ve seen with ambition for federal government implementation. It follows much of the playbook already established by the right wing extremists who seek book bans; it removes the publishers, teachers and librarians who are subject matter experts in child literacy from the equation, not only denigrating them as pedophiles and groomers but also calling for their imprisonment and registry as sex offenders. It flattens all queer art into the nebulous category of “pornography,” which at this point is well known code used to mask the flagrant transphobia and homophobia required to ban these books. And not only does it do that, it calls for all creators of that art to be imprisoned, aligning our work with the addictive and malignant social force of illicit drugs. As if all that were not bad enough, it also invokes the right wing boogey man of critical race theory, a brilliant lens for understanding law coined by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, as a justification for pulling all federal funding from any institution that teaches American history in a way that extremists dislike, and will lead to the continued banning of BIPOC stories from all of our public institutions of learning. That How to Be An Antiracist is the kind of book so frequently banned under this line of argument should be both no surprise and also instructive.

Authors Against Book Bans is committed to fighting against the forces that would rob us of our freedom to read. Project 2025 outlines an aggressive, unconscionable attack on that freedom. This is the land of the free. And we intend to read (and write) that way.

It is also worth noting that if there are readers who believe this is a far off, distant possibility, we already have state level legislation that is setting the groundwork of precedence. Idaho passed HB 710 in Spring of 2024, which removed librarians from the process of vetting content for libraries and made all public libraries financially liable for any book any person (whether they held a library card or not, or were a resident or not) finds objectionable for children. As a result, the public library in Donnelly, ID became adults only on July 1st of this year. The public library in Twin Falls, ID put up a sign requiring parents to sign an affidavit every time their child wanted to enter the library. Because that legislation passed in Idaho, nearly identical legislation has been introduced in Ohio. In Huntington Beach, CA, the public library had to remove every single book from board books to young adult to be audited for “pornography.” There was no porn there. Librarians and publishers have been seeing to that for years. But that has not stopped extremists from peddling this painful and dangerous lie. Book bans do not protect children. They just rob Americans of the freedom to read.

Readers, writers, and anyone who believes in freedom of expression or art, should be worried Project 2025’s incendiary plans for books.

And if you’d like to get involved with Authors Against Book Bans, they have lots of information on their FAQ page.