We must hold these truths
Our commitment to truth, discourse, and understanding the world is the American way.
Nothing is more fundamentally American than a commitment to truth, discourse, and understanding the world. That’s why the First Amendment is, well, first. It’s why our democracy has historically been committed to free public education. Without real information and the education necessary to evaluate it, citizens cannot understand, advocate, or vote for what is best for themselves or their country.
Repressive regimes are aware of the foundational nature of truth, too, so they work relentlessly against it. That’s why book burnings are a hallmark of Communists and Nazis and other dictators. It’s why repressive regimes from Russia to China have a history of scrapping or manipulating data collection when it shows that government policies are harming the populace. It’s why dictators target and defund universities and dumb down public schools.
And all of this is happening in America today.
Little is more un-American than a book ban. This was something we understood viscerally and instinctively in the 1950s, when book bans were in service of McCarthyist fear-mongering against Communism, so close on the heels of Nazi book burnings. But we seem more tolerant of them these days.
In schools throughout the country, books by and about the majority of humankind (women and people of color and LGBTQ+ people) have been removed under the guise of protecting children. Under the Trump Administration, books have been banned and “flagged” at military academy libraries as part of anti-DEI initiatives. It gives the lie to the school book bans. Military servicepeople are not children who need to be “protected” from potentially upsetting knowledge of how the world works; they are adults doing the work of our country in the world.
Similarly, thousands of government webpages and datasets have been taken down, especially ones related to health and climate. The Library of Congress website even deleted portions of the Constitution briefly. When books are pulled from libraries or webpages go dark, we lose facts as surely as if they had been burned to ash. These are modern book burnings, and the virtual bonfires are roaring.
Meanwhile, we are losing avenues for creating, sharing, and learning new information about the world. Billions of Congressionally-awarded dollars have been clawed back from science, research, libraries, and museums. The auditors who track taxpayer money have been fired en masse (a challenge their long-time champion Senator Grassley has disgracefully met with silence). After a national slowdown in hiring, the president personally fired the nation’s chief employment statistician, and his administration threatened to stop publishing the job report monthly. The administration ignores inconvenient statistics, like Washington, D.C.’s 30-year low in crime rates that shows how fabricated the administration’s so-called state of emergency is.
Thousands of employees have been fired from the agencies charged with creating a clear, nonpartisan report of the state of our country: the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That means less data is created, making Americans, American business, and American communities less able to understand and react to world events. But it makes it harder to contradict Trump administration lies.
And following a long history of starving public schools and universities for budget, red states have started overturning local policies, dictating what schools can or cannot teach, and taking books out of schools. States–including Iowa–have banned teaching about racism, LGBTQ+ people, and even sex. The result? Teachers fear reprisals for teaching historical facts.
What can we do about this? First and most important: do not obey in advance. Keep speaking out, calling out lies, and supporting fact-finders and truth-tellers. Preserve what you can. Keep paper books and prints of important historical documents and information. Nothing is more un-American than a book burning. The more people recognize book burning, the less they like it, and public backlash has forced the administration to back off before. Spread the word and put their feet to the flames.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Press-Citizen on August 23, 2025.