The on-air analysts and commentators were stunned into silence for what must have felt like an eternity during the “PBS News VOTE 2024 Election Coverage” last night.
It had been a long evening, as election nights typically are for journalists who cover politics, but it wasn’t quiet because there wasn’t anything new to report.
Instead, everyone at the anchor desk fell quiet and looked physically uncomfortable when one of the broadcast journalists reported that the Associated Press had called the swing state of Pennsylvania for Donald J. Trump.
I think it was Amy Walter, the editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, who first lowered her eyes and began staring at the desk in front of her.
Then it was Washington Post reporter Jonathan Capehart’s turn, followed by conservative editorial writer David Brooks of the New York Times. One by one, each of the journalists in the studio quietly looked down, uncaring for a long moment that network television news abhors an extended silence.
All of them understood what another Trump presidency meant, in detail, for them as journalists. The reality of being live on air when the critical swing state’s results were announced must have felt like the bottom had just dropped out of their souls.
You could read pain and mourning on their faces, in high definition.
Meanwhile, about 3,000 miles away from that tableau, local voting results strongly indicated that Pasadena’s Measure PL (for “Public Library”) was approved. Measure PL would provide the funding to rebuild the city’s Central Library, closed since 2021 due to concerns about the building’s ability to withstand a major earthquake.
The passing of Measure PL was good news, and it made sense the community would continue to support the crown jewel of the local library system.
So why was my stomach in knots, and why did I find myself staring silently at my keyboard like Amy, Jonathan and David?
It was because some time ago I had read through most of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project documents. And there’s a lot about libraries and librarians in Project 2025.
None of it good.
In the opening pages of what the New York Times calls the ideological blueprint for the second Trump administration, the document concludes that “pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” should be stripped of First Amendment protection and outlawed.
“Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders,” the document advises as federal policy.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. What books are librarians distributing that fall into THAT category?
Let’s start with an illustrated edition of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” released in 2019. According to Associated Press reporting, “There’s a depiction of a rape scene, a handmaid being forced into a sexual act,” according to Tom Bober, Clayton, Missouri’s district library coordinator and president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians. “It’s literally one panel of the graphic novel, but we felt it was in violation of the law in Missouri.”
What was that law? It was a state statute subjecting librarians to fines and possible imprisonment for allowing sexually explicit materials on bookshelves.
Sounds eerily similar to language from Project 2025, doesn’t it?
There are four copies of the graphic novel edition of the Atwood book at the Pasadena Public Library.
“The conventional wisdom is that libraries are a local matter. It was a given that library funding and policies were decided by local voters across hundreds of local zip codes and that the top of the ticket and national politics don’t matter. This ended on Election Night, 2024.“
According to the AP, many of the conflicts involve materials featuring racial and/or LGBTQ+ themes, such as Toni Morrison’s novel, “The Bluest Eye,” which was also the basis for a recent play produced in Pasadena by A Noise Within. Morrison’s book is one of the most frequently banned works in the United States.
The Pasadena Public Library stocks six copies of “The Bluest Eye,” and even carries a Spanish language edition.
EveryLibrary, an anti-censorship advocacy organization for libraries, puts it starkly, “The conventional wisdom is that libraries are a local matter. It was a given that library funding and policies were decided by local voters across hundreds of local zip codes and that the top of the ticket and national politics don’t matter.” The organization concludes, “This ended on Election Night, 2024.”
The Pasadena Public Library, according to the latest City of Pasadena budget summary, has about 88 full-time employees. Most of them are classified as librarians.
Yes, let’s celebrate that Pasadena voters decided to rebuild the Central Library. It may take until 2028 for the doors to once again open, but during that entire time we will be led by a U.S. President who believes he was given a clear mandate to implement all manner of conservative policies after he was told he won the popular vote.
Trump can’t run for the office again, which means he has nothing to lose by implementing some or all of Project 2025.
And whether or not he’s read it, the President will have “an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country.”
That’s language taken directly from the Heritage Foundation’s Web site.
Reopening a library building is something to celebrate. Having to register as a sex offender because you handed someone a book from a shelf in that building is just nuts.
God help us.
