A few weeks ago we wrote about the great American children’s history series going quietly out of print. The response was overwhelming. Thousands of you shared the post and hundreds subscribed. One question kept coming up: who is actually doing this?
This week, we got part of the answer.
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven counts. The allegation: between 2014 and 2023 the SPLC secretly funneled more than three million dollars to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and the organizers of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. One informant, the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, was on the payroll for nearly a decade.
During those same years, the SPLC was placing Moms for Liberty on its “hate map” next to the Klan. Parents Defending Education. No Left Turn in Education. American mothers reading school board agendas, lumped in with the groups the SPLC was quietly cutting checks to.
This is the organization whose designations drove a decade of news coverage about “the real threat to American libraries.” Meanwhile, the real book bans were happening somewhere else entirely.
The Blacklist Nobody Covered
In the spring of 2024, an anonymous Instagram account published a crowdsourced spreadsheet titled Is Your Fav Author a Zionist? Two hundred authors, color-coded by degree of suspected Zionism, with readers instructed to boycott every one of them.
As Seth Mandel wrote in Commentary, the list didn’t actually identify Zionists. It identified Jews.
Kristin Hannah was flagged red for posting a donation link to the Israeli Red Cross after October 7. Sarah J. Maas, whose fantasy novels are among the best-selling of the decade, was flagged because she once went on Birthright. Gabrielle Zevin made the list because she gave a talk at a Hadassah meeting. Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed nearly to death onstage in 2022 by an Islamist, was marked “unclear” for speaking at PEN America.
Later that year, Sally Rooney led more than a thousand writers in signing an open letter pledging not to work with Israeli publishers, festivals, or agencies. Jonathan Lethem. Arundhati Roy. An Israeli novelist named Michael Livschitz collected over 150 rejections from literary agents for a novel set in the IDF.
One literary agent, to James Kirchick in The New York Times: “Today it takes real courage to publish proudly Jewish authors. If you believe in Israel’s right to exist, the industry now considers it appropriate and desirable to completely cancel you.”
Lists. Color codes. Enforcement. That is a book ban. And it didn’t come from a school board meeting in Florida.
The Harry Potter Problem
J.K. Rowling is, by any reasonable measure, the most important children’s author of the last fifty years. An entire generation of kids chose books over screens because of her.
In May 2025, Rowling launched the JK Rowling Women’s Fund to provide legal support for women defending sex-based rights. In June, Booksmith, a San Francisco bookstore, pulled every Harry Potter title from its shelves. They replaced the section with a display called “Wizards, but not That Wizard.”
Fabulosa Books in the Castro followed a week later.
Picture this: Bookstores, removing the most-read children’s series of the last half century.
Because the author believes women are women.
The quieter version of this is happening in public libraries and school reading lists across the country. Acquisitions librarians skipping the reorder. Summer reading coordinators pulling the title. No paper trail, no challenge filed, no Moms for Liberty chapter anywhere to be found. Just the invisible hand of ideological curation.
The Inversion
Here’s the thing- the people who told you suburban mothers were the threat to American libraries were, at the same time, running a blacklist of Jewish authors, organizing a global boycott of Israeli writers, pulling Harry Potter off their own shelves, and letting the classics we wrote about last month go quietly out of print.
Eleven indictments. One exposed map. A children’s literary canon being rebuilt without our permission.
The parents, as they always do, had it right.
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Thank you,
Natalya
Restore Childhood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to protecting children’s education, health, and parental rights. Our last piece, “They Quietly Let the Best Children’s History Books Go Out of Print,” has the full resource list of where to find the books disappearing from shelves.
I'm a published author (under a pseudonym, thank goodness, because I engage in way to much wrongthink), and I've been trying to explain this to people for years. The publishing industry is even more woke than Hollywood, and although they claim to be anti-censorship, their actions prove exactly the opposite. "Progressive" authors have been banning books and creating social media "blacklists" — for the most minor offensive imaginable — for ages.
This is absolutely maddening! Thank you for sharing all of this fabulous information!