Many Americans viewed the 2024 election result as a threat to the democracy that our country prides itself on. While this may be an exaggeration in some respects, there is an existing threat to freedom of speech and the press. According to pen.org, in the academic year of 2023-2024, the nationwide book bans topped 10,000. This number triples that of the previous year and displays the threat to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that Congress cannot abridge the freedom of speech or of the press. It is possible that through the 2024 presidential campaign and the closer we get to the new administration, more books are at risk of being banned.
Education is one of the most powerful privileges of living in America and banning books is a threat to our democracy, a deprivation of knowledge and an exact example of the dystopian society that many banned books warn against. Banning books, which is a perceived goal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, hinders the intelligence of the next generation.
As a primarily conservative state, Florida faces a crisis of 5,001-6,000 book bans according to npr.org. This correlates with the education levels in Florida via the Tampa Bay Times as “Florida students learned 12 percent less each year from third to eighth grade than the national average from 2009 to 2018.”
A study by the Washington Post stated that only 11 people filed 60 percent of book bans. The people with the power to make decisions are the ones who are “offended” by and uncomfortable with the topics being discussed, such as gender and sexual identity, sexual experiences, violence and sexual health, according to edweek.org. Young Americans must be informed about these topics so that they can form their own opinions and help to sustain democracy.
Project 2025, according to cbsnews.com, is a blueprint for the upcoming Republican administration to exert control over the executive branch. Subsequently, americanprogress.org states that the Project 2025 agenda sets out to prosecute librarians over sharing books that “radical extremists have deemed obscene or dangerous.”
The “obscenity” that Project 2025 warns about is the reality of modern society as there are issues that cannot be ignored. On libbguides.com’s list of “Banned Books 2023-2024” is How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. The title could not be more clear and there is no excuse: the systems that ban this book are enabling racism.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which I read this summer, takes place in a dystopian society where books are illegal and burned in an attempt to secure “happiness” for citizens. However, this “happiness” is a hoax and a deprival of knowledge from members of society.
Have we become the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451 that takes away knowledge for the sole reason of it being uncomfortable? Depriving Americans of important literature for personal reasons has created a “Fahrenheit 2025” of our own accord.
Today, society is challenged by the uprising of AI and ChatGPT for intellectual purposes, making pure literature more important than ever. Temperatures are rising in the United States, and come inauguration day, they threaten to burn democracy and American literature as a whole. In the words of Stephen King, “Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your brain because that is exactly what you need to know.”