Amid last week’s parade of proclamations about beardo generals and Navy-vessel aesthetics, there was one announcement that felt wholesomely, uncomplicatedly good: “Reading Rainbow” is back — at least for a limited time. The award-winning former PBS show, hosted by LeVar Burton from 1983 to 2009, has been rebooted for a four-episode season hosted by California-based librarian Mychal Threets, a “Reading Rainbow” superfan whose joyful TikTok dispatches have been keeping the show’s spirit alive since he began posting during the pandemic. When a trailer for the show was released, it racked up more than 2 million views.
Book bans and challenges continue to rise in record numbers — but, more importantly, are coming to feel increasingly inevitable.
The show’s return feels like a brief respite from the anti-education storm on which the second Trump administration blew in last January. In the 10 months since, the landscape of public education has already felt its effects in actions like the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s sole federal agency for libraries. Ahead of Banned Book Week (Oct. 5–11), PEN America’s newest report, “Banned in the USA: the normalization of book banning,” confirms that book bans and challenges continue to rise in record numbers — but, more importantly, are coming to feel increasingly inevitable. With a deliberate callback to the era of Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, PEN America asserts that the coordinated, systematic attack on literacy and critical thinking inherent in book bans under Trump 2.0 can be called the “Ed Scare.”
Unlike the American Library Association, which defines a banned book as one that has been “completely removed from a library or school collection due to objections from a person or group,” PEN America’s definition is broader, with the terms “bans” and “challenges” denoting “any action taken against a book based on its content that leads to a previously accessible book” being restricted or removed. Using this measure, the new report counts 6,870 books that were banned in the 2024–25 school year, in 23 states and 87 public school districts. That’s actually down a couple thousand from the 2023–24 tally of 10,000 — but the report’s overview remains grim regardless:
“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country. Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide. Never before have so many politicians sought to bully school leaders into censoring according to their ideological preferences, even threatening public funding to exact compliance. Never before has access to so many stories been stolen from so many children.”
As in previous years, the majority of book bans have been enacted in the ban-happy states of Florida (2,304 instances), Texas (1,781 instances) and Tennessee (1,622 instances). The reasons for challenges and bans, too, remain consistent: Among the most frequently challenged books are those that feature characters of color and explorations of race and racism, and those that foreground LGBTQ characters and representation of same-sex attraction and love. And the groups catalyzing the bans, despite often identifying as “grassroots,” are still ones like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, funded by right-wing donors and think tanks wielding copied-and-pasted lists of books to ban in bulk — books that most of their members are unlikely to have actually read, but that they can denounce with hypersensationalized phrases including “pornography” and “critical race theory.” The most frequently banned books include classics like Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” and Judy Blume’s “Forever,” histories like “A Queer History of the United States,” bestsellers with a broad cultural footprint like Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” historical young-adult fiction like Malinda Lo’s “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” and graphic novels like Raina Telgemeier’s “Drama.”
PEN America’s report doesn’t include the prospective bans of romance novels, fanfiction and stories with LGBTQ characters proposed by an Oklahoma bill that considers it a felony to own, read or write books that fall into a vague and capacious definition of “prurient” and “patently offensive,” with repercussions, including prison sentences, for those who publish or sell such works. (The bill’s author, a state senator with the menacingly ridiculous name Dusty Deever, is known for introducing legislatively overreaching bills that don’t pass, but the Author’s Guild notes that this one might be meant to provoke a fight that leads to the Supreme Court.
It also doesn’t include rogue instances in which books are stolen and destroyed, like the one that occurred this April when an Ohio man checked out 100 books from a branch of the Cuyahoga County library in Ohio — most of them on subjects like Jewish, African American and LGBTQ+ history — and recorded himself burning them, later uploading the videos to Telegram. Just as attempts to restrict abortion have inspired attacks on women’s clinics and assassinations of providers, increasingly dramatic portrayals of books as dangerous simply for focusing on a wider spectrum of people and histories will undoubtedly inspire more book-adjacent violence.
There’s a paradox at the heart of contemporary book bans: Americans of all ages are reading fewer books and spending less time engaged in reading for pleasure than they did in past decades. Efforts to restrict what books are available to public school students have increased dramatically since 2020, yet concern about the reach of virtual spaces where the youth are equally likely — and in fact more likely — to flex their curiosity about lives different from their own seems much more subdued. It feels as though the organized pressure on school boards and elected officials is a kind of censorious Hail Mary, one last, sustained push to control the physical symbols of a world that has otherwise evolved past the need for pious, moralistic guidance on what young people should open their hearts and minds to.
The blueprint for education in Trump 2.0 is more accurately described as tyrants engaged in deliberate dumbing down.
Because the fact is that Americans broadly disfavor book bans, in schools or elsewhere; a 2023 survey conducted by Book Riot and the Everylibrary Institute found that 67% of parents think book bans are “a waste of time” and 74% believe they “infringe on parents’ rights.” A 2024 dispatch from the Knight Foundation found that, in a survey of more than 4,500 adults, more Americans said “that it was more concerning to restrict students’ access to books with educational value than it was to provide them with access to books that have inappropriate content.”
The real preoccupation of the groups fomenting these bans is that young people discovering new ideas and possibilities within books will realize the authority figures in their own lives are motivated by fear and bigotry. Project 2025’s plans for remaking the public-education system are almost all written with an eye toward education as indoctrination — more parental and religious involvement, more restrictions on how students can and cannot be taught, more explicitly religious education and homeschooling. Former brain surgeon and onetime Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson once warned that “an uneducated populace is likely to be duped by tyrants,” but the blueprint for education in Trump 2.0 is more accurately described as tyrants engaged in deliberate dumbing down.
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One of the first actions of Trump 2.0’s Department of Education was rescinding the guidance on book bans and civil rights issued during Joe Biden’s presidency — in a nutshell, that the federal government “has no role in” removing books from school districts — and eliminating the role of book-ban coordinator, created by the Biden administration to standardize protocol for schools facing book bans. If Project 2025 succeeds in its goal of implementing federal bans on books in schools, it is unlikely that they will stop there.
The upside, of course, remains as true as ever: Whatever the subject or author or decade, restricting access to books by deeming them dangerous or subversive only makes them more appealing. A recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and George Mason University looked at more than 1,500 titles that appeared on lists of frequently challenged books between 2021 and 2022, looking for patterns in how removal from school libraries impacted them. Many of the results reflect exactly what you might expect, particularly from teens: the circulation of banned books increased 12%, on average, when compared to non-banned books with similar focus and content. The demand for a book banned in one state’s school districts increased by roughly 11% in states whose school districts didn’t ban it.
The frisson of the forbidden is often the difference between wanting and not wanting to read any given book. Lesser-known authors who highlight their alleged subversiveness on social media generally see increased readership, and a quick survey of Goodreads’ “Listopia” section reveals dozens of lists with titles like “Banned Books That Everyone Should Read,” “Books I’m Going to Hell for Reading” and “Books About Banned Books” — underscoring that, to American teens in particular, a banned book is an alluring one.
Which doesn’t mean the normalization of book bans that have become a “routine and expected part of school operations,” per the PEN America report, isn’t a source of dread. As an autocratic dystopia continues to take shape, it’s difficult not to wonder how far this will go. Will libraries become the new speakeasies? Are local bookstores going to be instructed to surveil customers or risk being shut down? How will the forces of book banning continue to accuse teachers of “indoctrinating” students in Black and LGBTQ history while simultaneously defending their own agenda of indoctrination? Book banners are waging a fight they know they can’t win — but having nothing to lose might make them more dangerous than ever.
