‘The Librarians’: Meet the heroes fighting against conservative book bans in the South
They weren’t looking for a fight. Then the fight came to their libraries, families, and lives.
By Christopher Wiggins February 09, 2026
When Courtney Gore sat down with her Texas school district’s curriculum, she expected to find something, anything, that would justify the panic she’d been hearing for months. The warnings had been vivid and insistent: children were being “indoctrinated,” parents were losing control, and public schools had become staging grounds in a cultural war over gender, sexuality, and race. Gore, a former educator turned Texas school board member, had moved close enough to those arguments to believe that maybe there was a fire somewhere behind all that smoke.
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What she found instead was paper. Lesson plans. Objectives. Exercises in naming feelings and learning how to sit with disagreement.
“I read through all the lesson plans, and it was great things we were teaching our kids,” she told The Advocate. The materials focused on social and emotional learning, how children recognize their emotions, how they resolve conflict, and how they learn to live alongside other people. None of it resembled the lurid stories she’d been told.
Leaving Moms for Liberty’s propaganda behind
That quiet discovery, mundane, bureaucratic, almost aggressively normal, is one of the emotional hinges of The Librarians, a new documentary by Peabody Award–winning filmmaker Kim A. Snyder, premiering Monday on PBS.
The film, which focuses on several Texas school districts, including Keller and Granbury, begins with a list: In 2021, Texas state Rep. Matt Krause, a Republican, circulated the names of 850 books for review, many of them focused on LGBTQ+ lives, race, racism, and history. But Snyder’s film is not really about lists. It’s about what happens after the list is made — about the people who enforce it, the people who resist it, and the people who get caught in between.
Related: How library workers are defending books, democracy, and queer lives
Related: Book bans in schools are more widespread than ever. Which states have had the most?
Two organizations loom large in that story. One is Moms for Liberty, a right-wing parents’ group that has become a central organizing force in book challenges and school board fights across the country. Founded in 2021, the group frames itself as a defender of “parental rights,” but it has built a national network around opposing LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula, diversity initiatives, and books that address sexuality, gender identity, or systemic racism. The other is Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based wireless company that markets itself as a “conservative” alternative to major carriers and funnels money into local school board races and right-wing causes, particularly in Texas. In Snyder’s film, they appear as infrastructure: the messaging, the money, the training, the amplification.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Meet some of the anti-book ban heroes from ‘The Librarians’ | Advocate.com
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