Apparently, lots of repressive folks in Texas would be much happier if children grow up never knowing anything. At least that’s what it seems like now that one school district in Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered librarians to remove an illustrated adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank from its shelves and digital libraries. The librarians were also required to remove the Bible and a slew of other books that parents challenged last year, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reports.

Seems to me that ever since Greg Abbott became governor, Texas has become a haven for extremist conservatives who think they should be able to impose their will on everyone else. While the state has always leaned to the right, it didn’t use to be this bad. I know, because I lived there, and I found people to be friendly and welcoming in a state full of astounding natural beauty.

Well, color me sad now, because it sure isn’t like that anymore. The flying monkeys are running the building and it would appear that some of them work at the Keller Independent School District in Keller, Texas. The book purge was requested by a district executive in an email Tuesday, and a copy of the email was obtained by JTA. The email was also circulated on social media.

“By the end of today, I need all of the books pulled from the library,” Jennifer Price, Keller’s ISD’s executive of curriculum and instruction wrote.

In the age of Trump, conservative parents and school board members have gone off the hook deciding what everyone else should read and requesting books be pulled off the shelves. This is especially true for books that contain LGBTQ-friendly content or those that mention Critical Race Theory in any form. Even books with Jewish themes are being caught in the net.

How unutterably sad.

“It’s disgusting. It’s devastating. It’s legitimate book banning, there’s no way around it,” said Laney Hawes, herself a parent in the Keller district, in an interview with JTA, regarding the order. “I feel bad for the teachers and the librarians.”

The New York Times found the book Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky to be “so engaging and effective that it’s easy to imagine it replacing the [original] ‘Diary’ in classrooms and among younger readers.” Except now conservatives in this district have gotten their grubby hands on this imaginative 2019 adaptation so kids here won’t have the chance to enjoy the book.

Parents began challenging the book in February, and early on, the district dismissed the challenges, Hawes said. Hawes, who isn’t Jewish, is part of a list of parents who can be called on to serve on a committee to review book challenges.

“When we got The Diary of Anne Frank, we thought ‘This is a joke.’ But it wasn’t,” Hawes said, adding that the parental complaint was along the lines of “the book shouldn’t be read without parent supervision.”

Hawes thinks it’s likely the parent was objecting to the unabridged diary’s references to female genitalia and same-sex attraction and other sexual practices that have been deemed “pornographic” — arguments that have been used in the past. But Hawes wasn’t able to find out what in particular bothered this parent because she didn’t show up to the meeting.

So Hawes’ committee reinstated the book, thinking this would be the last they would hear about it. This was certainly a good thought, but that’s not what happened. Following school board elections in May, right-wingers, fueled by funds from a Christian PAC affiliated with the conservative cell phone company Patriot Mobile, captured a majority on the school board.

And it’s these people who are rewriting the guidelines about responding to parental challenges regarding books and as a result, they have ordered all books that met with parental challenges last year to be removed from school libraries for the time being.

“Right now, Keller’s ISD administration is asking our campus staff  and librarians to review books that were challenged last year to determine if they meet the requirements of the new policy,” said the district in a statement to JTA. “Books that meet the new guidelines will be returned to the libraries as soon as it is confirmed they comply with the new policy.”

In the statement, the district did not mention Anne Frank’s diary or the Bible, which was another book that was challenged last year and will presumably be removed from school shelves. Sadly, some of the other books likely to be removed are Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

The district hasn’t said when this new policy will be implemented. The district’s current policy allows district parents, employees, or “District residents” to challenge the appropriateness of any book.

Understandably, the literary free speech organization PEN America is criticizing the district’s actions.

“The sweeping attempt to remove these titles from classrooms and libraries on the eve of a new school year is an appalling affront to students’ First Amendment Rights,” Jonathan Friedman, the organization’s director of free expression and education programs remarked in a statement. “It is virtually impossible to run a school or a library that purges books in response to any complaint from any corner.”

This district was subjected to an investigation in 2021 by the Texas Education Agency thanks to allegations by Abbott that the district was making “sexually explicit” books available to children.

“This group of people elected to our board, and the crazy parents behind them, decided that the committees must be rigged,” Hawes said, adding that parents would attend school board meetings and allege that there were “conspiracies to take over our public schools,” while wearing T-shirts that said “Alex Jones was right.”

That’s how bad things have become in Texas with Abbott at the helm. I don’t think I’d recognize the place anymore.