LIBRARIES
PAGE ONE
Panel 1
A female librarian is shelving books. An angry white man in a t-shirt and baseball cap confronts her, pointing angrily.
CAPTION: Book bans are key to Project 2025’s plans to discredit librarians and dismantle libraries. They claim:
ANGRY MAN: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” [2025, p. 5]
Panel 2
A close up of the man’s shouting face.
CAPTION: In Project 2025’s vision, “pornography” includes any content that positively represents LGBTQ people, especially trans people.
ANGRY MAN: Transgender ideology! Sex promotion!
CAPTION: To Project 2025, sex education textbooks are pornography, too. They call them “sex promotion textbooks.” [2025, p. 477]
Panel 3
An image of an ALA chart called “Censorship by the Numbers.” It shows a line graph of the “number of unique titles challenged by year.” In 2004, the number was 390; in 2014, the number was 183. But the line takes a huge jump after that: in 2021, the number was 1,858, in 2022 it was 2,571, and in 2023 it was 4,240. To the right of the chart is a book-shaped logo for “Freed Between the Lines,” and below that is this info: “Censorship on the Rise: The record-breaking number of unique titles targeted in 2023 marked a 65% increase over 2022. Prior to 2021, the average number of unique titles targeted per year was 273.”
CAPTION: The people behind Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation – provide funding and support to groups like Moms for Liberty, an organization whose chapters advocate for book bans around the country.
CAPTION: Book bans have risen dramatically and alarmingly in recent years.
Panel 4
The angry man has been joined by another man and a woman. The second man, in a white man in a polo shirt, kicks over a book cart, sending books flying everywhere. The angry man and the woman (who is wearing sunglasses and a “Q” shirt) cheer him on.
CAPTION: And the books Moms for Liberty wants to ban from school and public libraries? Yes, the “Moms” often call them pornography.
CAPTION: Librarians don’t “purvey pornography.”
Panel 5
A silhouette of five eager hands reaching out for a book from the left side of the panel, which is being handed to them from a stack on the right side of the panel.
CAPTION: Librarians use their professional expertise to select books that “represent the broad range of human experience, reflecting the ethnic, religious, racial, and socio-economic diversity not only of the region [the library] serves but also the larger global perspective.”*
FOOTNOTE: *From the American Library Association Selection Policy Toolkit
Panel 6
An image of the cover of the graphic novel New Kid, by Jerry Craft, which features a young black boy in a hoodie and backpack writing in a blue notebook and the text “Middle school is hard enough without being the…New Kid.”
CAPTION: Project 2025 wants to stop you from reading those books.
CAPTION: Books like New Kid, Jerry Craft’s Newbery-Award-winner about a Black kid navigating a new, predominantly white school…