Pretty much the title sums it up. There’s a lot to be concerned about, and one thing I find personally disconcerting is how US educational systems might be impacted.
Do we need to make backups of, like, everything educational and scientific? And where are all the places and forms that we can host these materials?
Edit: to everyone saying it shouldn’t be an issue because Trump/US doesn’t control information in the rest of the world, keep in mind that is little comfort to those of us here if access to that information becomes restricted as well. We should be seeking to hedge all bets.
A climate change denier will head of the EPA.
A vaccine denier will be our Health Secretary.
An oil exec will head the Department of Energy.
Trump has been vocally pro-book bans in the past, and the modern GOP has never been against it, and has even been doing it at an increasing rate over the past few years.
These are people that are happy to remove other people that disagree with them. You really don’t think they’re going to remove books and papers? lol
The only thing is that there’s not really a vehicle for the fed to implement those bans. For all the weaknesses in the US constitution, freedom of speech is a historically tough nut for the government to crack. Not that they haven’t tried, but they have almost no control over what media is and is not allowed to be published publicly.
What is working is when states get to decide what material to provide in schools. That includes required curriculum and what books they will buy and offer in classrooms and libraries. So the state can teach (or not teach) whatever they want within the confines of their own schools, but there’s nothing they could do if, say, someone was to set up shop on the sidewalk across the street and hand out free copies of Gender Queer to any students who walk by. Nor could the fed, as it stands.
So we’ve led our horses to water, but how do we make them drink? How do you convince the students to want to pick up that book and read it for fun, and how can you help them understand what it all means when the critical reading skills for queer literature are not being taught?
“We’ve led the horse to water” is just “it’s not literally illegal to own?” OK.
Remove books and papers from where? The government in the US has influence on this, for sure, but there is no mechanism for the government to interfere with the private ownership of literature