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executive order
Librarians and Publishers Alarmed as Tennessee Libraries Shut Down for GOP 'Book Purge'
"It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them," said a coalition of 33 library groups, publishing companies, and civil rights organizations.
Nov 27, 2025
Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children's books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.
For Popular Information, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims reported Tuesday that the "book purge" is required to be carried out at all 181 libraries in the Tennessee Regional Library System, which encompasses most of the state, aside from cities like Nashville and Memphis.
It comes after Tennessee's Republican Secretary of State, Tre Hargett, sent a pair of letters earlier this fall. The first, sent on September 8, said that in order to receive state and federal grants, which run through his office, libraries needed to comply with a Tennessee law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices from agencies, as well as President Donald Trump's executive order on "gender ideology," which effectively ended the federal recognition of transgender and nonbinary individuals.
As the report notes, neither of these orders says anything about library books. However, Hargett argued that compliance with the executive order mandated book bans because it states that "federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.”
Not only do executive orders typically not apply to state and local governments, but the federal funds Tennessee's libraries receive are not used to purchase books at all. Instead, according to the secretary of state's website, they “provide all state residents with online access to essential library and information resources, including licensed databases, a statewide library catalog and interlibrary loan system, bibliographic services, and materials for the disadvantaged.”
The Every Library Institute, an advocacy group that supports federal funding for libraries, said that Hargett's instructions "contain significant errors, likely exceeding the secretary’s authority and reflecting a political agenda rather than a neutral or accurate interpretation of federal or state law."
"Hargett is setting a dangerous precedent by placing Tennessee’s state and municipal government under the authority of any executive order by any president," the group continued. "Executive orders are not laws."
But Crosby and Sims argued: "Even if the executive order did apply to Tennessee local libraries, simply having books with LGBTQ stories and characters does not constitute 'promoting gender ideology.' The classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood involves a wolf eating a little girl, but does not promote violence. Children’s books are stories, not instruction manuals."
On October 27, Hargett sent another letter, giving libraries 60 days to undertake an "age appropriateness review" of all books in their children's section to find any books that may be inconsistent either with Tennessee's age appropriateness law or with Trump's executive order.
As Ken Paulson, the director of Middle Tennessee University's Free Speech Center, noted, the age appropriateness law, which was last updated in 2024, "is modeled after obscenity laws and prohibits nudity, excessive violence, and explicit sexuality, hardly the stuff of children’s sections. Further, the law applies to school libraries, not public libraries."
Though Hargett provided no criteria for how to assess what books would need to be purged, he did provide an example of one he felt violated both orders: Fred Gets Dressed, a 2021 picture book by the New York Times bestselling author Peter Brown. As Popular Information noted:
The book, which was written by a straight, cisgender man, does not feature any LGBTQ characters. Instead it is based on a childhood experience of the author in which he tried on his mother’s clothing and makeup. If a book about a boy trying on his mother’s clothes is the strongest example of “promoting gender ideology” that Hargett could identify, it raises questions about the necessity of the review.
Earlier this month, the state's Rutherford County Library System, which serves the cities of Smyrna and Murfreesboro, shut down several of its library branches for up to a week to “meet new reporting requirements" from Hargett's office.
It's unclear why the Rutherford County system determined it needed to shut down in order to carry out the review, nor has it been made clear whether other library systems will be expected to do the same.
As former librarian Kelly Jensen noted for the blog Book Riot, the Rutherford County system has made its own efforts to ban transgender-friendly books, but backed off from the policy earlier this summer for fear of litigation after a Murfreesboro law branding "homosexuality" as a form of "public indecency" resulted in the city being forced to settle a lawsuit for $500,000.
Kelly wrote that for Rutherford library system's board, Hargett's order is "a convenient means of subverting their fears of litigation, which drove them to change their anti-trans book policy earlier this summer. If the directive is from the state, then they 'have to' comply. The Tennessee secretary of state is granting permission slips to public library boards to ban away."
This week, a group of 33 major publishers, library advocacy groups, and free speech and civil rights organizations signed onto a letter to Hargett expressing "profound concern" over its review mandate.
The coalition included PEN America, the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the transgender rights advocacy organization GLAAD. Major publishing houses also signed on, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.
"These types of reviews create immense administrative burdens for library systems and often lead to illegal censorship, which raises liability risks for local communities and the state," the groups said. "Many libraries, uncertain about the legal and procedural basis for the mandate, have had to redirect limited resources, with some temporarily closing branches to complete these reviews, which are implied to be necessary for future funding."
"The demands in your letter need immediate clarification, as it is not reasonable to expect libraries to follow directives that would risk violating applicable law, including the US Constitution," they added. "It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them. This is a well-settled legal principle."
The Rutherford County Library Alliance, which has challenged municipal anti-LGBTQ+ laws as well as the censorship policies of the library's own board, said that “we have seen firsthand the concrete harm of the Secretary’s directives—library closures during story time, intimidation of professional librarians, and the breakdown of democratic representation in our public library system."
"We hope Secretary Hargett will fulfill their duty to promote library development by supporting our constitutionally-guaranteed rights and our highly trained librarians," the alliance added, "rather than enabling censorship from 0.001% of our community for 100% of our community.”
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The Hemispheric Presidency: Emergency Powers and the New US Doctrine in Latin America
Trump's emerging doctrine is anchored in the expansion of presidential authority, representing the full extension of the unitary executive theory or the imperial presidency into the sphere of foreign policy.
Nov 08, 2025
The latest round of deadly boat strikes, which killed 3 people—bringing the total death toll to at least 70 since September—are confirmation that the second Trump administration has decisively refocused US foreign policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean.
Long treated as a secondary concern, including during President Donald Trump’s first term, when attention centered on China, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, the region has returned to the forefront of US global strategy. But what is emerging is not a revival of Cold War containment or the Monroe Doctrine. It is the consolidation of a new US doctrine, one that aims to fuse emergency powers, economic warfare, and militarization into a unified hemispheric order.
This emerging doctrine is anchored in the expansion of presidential authority. It represents the full extension of the unitary executive theory or the imperial presidency into the sphere of foreign policy, an effort to normalize executive unilateralism as the organizing principle of US governance at home and abroad. Trump’s approach reveals how emergency powers techniques, such as executive orders, emergency declarations, and budgetary discretion, are being implemented as instruments of foreign policy.
This realignment is only possible because of the profound transformations generated by the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, which over the last three decades expanded the legal and institutional capacity of the US executive branch to govern through permanent emergency. What began as exceptional counterinsurgency frameworks, asset seizures, sanctions, and military authorizations without congressional approval has evolved into the standard operating logic of the US government.
Under Trump, these tools have coalesced into a coherent hemispheric project.
Emergency powers serve as the connective tissue linking military strikes, financial bailouts, and sanctions into a coherent system of hemispheric governance.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy rests on a single assumption: that the president can act independently of Congress, international law, and long-standing diplomatic norms. This logic manifests through unilateral bailouts, economic and financial sanctions, and militarized interventions.
For instance, the Trump administration’s authorization of 17 direct boat strikes in the Caribbean illustrates how the administration treats military action as an extension of executive discretion. In a highly contested argument, the Trump administration has maintained that the president has the legal authority to carry out these attacks.
The attacks are against vessels allegedly linked to narcotics operations, though many lacked the capacity or cargo to justify the strikes. Some accounts note that the goal with these strikes is not interdiction, but provocation, using force to engineer confrontation and accelerate regime change in Venezuela.
The Caribbean, once imagined as America’s “backyard,” has become the theater where emergency powers are rehearsed as everyday statecraft.
The economic arm of this doctrine operates on the same logic. On October 17, the administration announced a $40 billion bailout for Argentine President Javier Milei, the self-styled “anarcho-capitalist” who wields a chainsaw as a symbol of his promise to “cut the state.” Half of the funds came from US public reserves and half from private investors, without congressional approval.
The measure was less about stabilizing Argentina’s economy than about underwriting a radical neoliberal experiment that mirrors Trump’s domestic agenda. Milei’s program, including privatizing pensions, slashing social services, and gutting labor protections, has been hailed in Washington as proof of “fiscal responsibility.”
But as Mother Jones revealed, hedge-fund billionaire Rob Citrone, who had recently invested heavily in Argentine debt, maintained close ties with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, raising questions about conflicts of interest and influence peddling.
In this context, the bailout secures a government ideologically aligned with Trumpism while reinforcing US financial dominance. More importantly, the US taxpayers’ bailout played a key role in Milei’s victory on October 26’s legislative elections, giving him a lifeline to address the economic stability exacerbated by Milei’s own policies. Thus, through the language of crisis management, the executive transforms financial rescue into a form of governance by decree.
The military dimension of this doctrine is even more telling. The Caribbean has become the primary stage for the remilitarization of US power and the enactment of presidential emergency authority abroad. In recent months, the Pentagon launched the largest regional deployment in decades.
In late October, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford left the Croatian port of Split for the Caribbean, joined by seven other warships and dozens of fighter jets. More than 10,000 US troops are currently deployed in the area, half aboard naval vessels and half stationed in Puerto Rico. The deployment followed a series of military practices and intelligence operations aimed at destabilizing the government of Nicolas Maduro, all justified by executive authorizations and emergency powers.
Here, Puerto Rico plays a decisive role. The archipelago’s colonial status allows the administration to deploy forces, intelligence, and financial instruments beyond the constraints of congressional oversight. Its ports and bases have been reactivated as platforms for surveillance, drone operations, and logistics under the pretext of “regional security.” The remilitarization of the archipelago echoes the Cold War, when Puerto Rico served as the hinge for US interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Central America. To its environmental, social, and politico-economic detriment, Puerto Rico has been placed at the center of the US intervention on Venezuela, Colombia, and other “enemies” of the Trump administration.
Parallel to the military buildup, the administration has expanded its economic warfare campaign across the hemisphere. Economic and financial sanctions on Venezuela have deepened, further debilitating its oil sector and currency circulation, while the Treasury has introduced new tariffs and sanctions on Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. The coordination between the State Department and Treasury has transformed sanctions into weapons of punishment, instrumentalizing law to produce political compliance.
Furthermore, on November 5, the US Supreme Court heared arguments in a case on that could redefine the presidential emergency powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The case stems from President Trump’s use of IEEPA to impose sweeping global tariffs, actions he justified as responses to “unusual and extraordinary threats” to US national security and the economy. The court’s decision will determine whether the president can unilaterally wield emergency powers to reshape trade policy, bypassing Congress and potentially transforming emergency authority into a routine tool of governance.
These sanctions, tarrifs, and “boat strike” authorizations were issued through executive orders, bypassing both congressional approval and multilateral oversight. Emergency powers serve as the connective tissue linking military strikes, financial bailouts, and sanctions into a coherent system of hemispheric governance.
Within this architecture, Puerto Rico stands as the linchpin. Its colonial legal status allows Washington to merge colonial governance with global military reach. The archipelago is now both a financial enclave and a military platform, where the imperial presidency meets authoritarian neoliberalism.
Thus, what is emerging is a new doctrine of foreign policy based on emergency powers. This policy deploys tools once reserved for domestic crises to govern an entire hemisphere. Under Trump, Latin America and the Caribbean have become extensions of the US executive powers, managed through decrees, loans, and strikes, all justified as acts of necessity, all serving the same logic of control.
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By Attacking Anti-Fascism, Trump Defends Fascism as a Good Thing
While there was little doubt before as to where Trump stood on democracy and human decency, he has made it clear with his decision to designate Antifa a “terrorist” organization that he and his coterie are clearly on the side of fascism.
Sep 27, 2025
Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” has spurred widespread interest in the anti-fascist movement. Of course, it is well understood that Antifa is not a single organization but an umbrella term for loosely affiliated groups of activists scattered across the United States and parts of Europe that confront and combat fascism and racism. Antifa, however, is more of an idea than an actual organization, so Trump’s order calling on US authorities to act against “any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support" isn’t simply idiotic and unconstitutional but says a great deal about where the “beloved leader” stands on free speech and fascism itself.
Simply put, by vilifying anti-fascist struggles, Trump is defending fascism as a good thing. So is his “comrade-in-arms” Viktor Orbán who has also proposed taking similar action in Hungary while his Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó has gone even further by urging the European Union to follow Donald Trump’s lead and designate Antifa a terrorist organization.
In the age of right-wing authoritarianism and proto-fascist strongmen, it is understandable that Trump and Orban wish to ban anti-fascist struggles. Relying on repression to consolidate power is an obligatory measure for all authoritarian regimes. Netanyahu might be the next unhinged leader to take action against Antifa. Anti-fascists in Israel have long been the target of far-right Israeli extremists; moreover, there have been voices inside the country saying that “only an anti-fascist front” can stop Israel’s slide toward fascism. That’s dangerous talk in the current political climate in Israel.
Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu are central figures in the global far-right movement. Indeed, the holy trinity of neofascism is represented today by Israel, Hungary, and the United States. Far-right movements and parties are on the rise worldwide, and they are expanding beyond national borders, “engaging in cross-border networking to export their ideologies worldwide,” according to Thomas Greven from Freie Universität Berlin. What unites them are anti-immigrant politics, anti-leftism, traditional family values, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ, and rejection of the ideals and values of Western European Enlightenment.
Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu are central figures in the global far-right movement. Indeed, the holy trinity of neofascism is represented today by Israel, Hungary, and the United States.
Far-right movements and neofascist parties believe that cultural hegemony is as important as political influence. Hence the attack on “woke” culture, gender ideology, and secularism. Of course, the far right is not a monolith, but there are lots of overlaps among the far-right’s varied movements. However, in the pursuit of creating an ultranationalistic state and building a homogeneous society, crushing the forces of the left becomes nothing short of an urgent political necessity for far-right movements and neofascist parties because of their awareness that especially the so-called "radical left" represents the only real political resistance to their dystopian vision.
Whether there are parallels between the state of liberal democracies today and that of the 1930s is tricky business. Nonetheless, today’s left could learn vital lessons by studying the antifascist struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. For the main task today is, again, defeating the forces of reaction, most powerfully represented by an idiotic bully and wannabe dictator in Washington, DC, an autocrat in Budapest, and the “butcher of Gaza” in Jerusalem.
For starters, the left needs to be united and thus avoid infighting. Liberals must also be seen as potential allies in the fight against right-wing authoritarianism and “proto-fascism.” The ability of the Nazis in Germany to overpower the opposition prior to Hitler’s rise to power surely relied on a sustained campaign of terror against the labor movement, communists, and anti-fascist activists while the state looked the other way, but it was also due to the fact that the left was fractured while the right united behind Hitler. The left was also divided in Italy while the fascists marched through towns beating and killing hundreds of labor leaders, socialists, and communists. Sadly enough, a similar phenomenon was encountered in Spain, with the left struggling to unite both before and during the Spanish Civil War.
Nonetheless, the anti-fascist struggles of the pre-war period remain of paramount importance and have in fact shaped the left of today, as Joseph Fronczak has argued in his book Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism. The first antifascist organization was the Arditi del Popolo (People’s Shock Troops) in Italy, formed in 1921 by various militants (anarchists, left socialists, communists, and Republicans) who saw that the Socialist Party was either incapable or unwilling to take the fight to the fascists. Working-class defense organizations existed in Italy both before and after World War I, but the emergence of the Arditi del Popolo was driven by the urgent need to “defend the persons and institutions of the working class from fascist squadrism by openly confronting fascism on the same terrain of violence chosen by the Mussolini movement,” as the Italian scholar Antonio Sonnessa has pointed out.
The ultimate organized resistance to Italian fascism took place in August 1922 in the city of Parma when the Arditi del Popolo and their allies Formazioni di difesa proletaria (Proletarian Defense Formations), outnumbered and outgunned, repelled and totally humiliated thousands of fascists. This event represented a rare moment of unity among the different strands of the Italian left, although the fascists may not have been repelled if it wasn’t for the valiant support provided by the working-class people of Parma. As Guido Picelli, the head of the Arditi del Popolo of Parma later recalled:
Working-class people took to the streets—as bold as the waters of a river which is bursting its banks. With their shovels, pick-axes, iron bars and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del Popolo to dig up the cobblestones and tram tracks, to dig trenches, and to erect barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything else they could get their hands on. Men, women, old people, young people from all parties and from no party at all were all there, united in a single iron will: resist and fight.
Nevertheless, the main parties of the left went on afterwards to abandon the Arditi del Popolo and Mussolini was in power just ten weeks after his horde of fascist thugs were defeated in Parma.
In 1932, the German Communist Party (KPD) launched Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action), but the antifa movement failed to create antifascist unity as the KPD’s ideology and strategy was formed by Stalinism which had branded the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as “social fascists.” That said, the SPD also had nothing but contempt and even hatred for the KPD and the party’s ideology, structure, and political culture, as Donna Harsch has argued in her path-breaking work German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism, left it incapable of taking on the Nazis and helping to avert the collapse of the Weimar Republic. In this sense, as David Karvala, one of the spokespeople of Unity Against Fascism and Racism Catalonia, has stressed, “The disastrous failure of the anti-fascist action strategy should serve as a warning to activists who want to stop fascism today.”
On October 4, 1936, an estimated 300,000 Londoners, socialists, trade unionists, communists, Jews (who had been told by the Jewish Chronicle to stay home), and Irish dockworkers, blocked a march through the East End of London, home to the city’s largest Jewish community, organized by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). As the British historian and author Martin Gilbert wrote, the BUFs’ “aim was to intimidate the local Jewish community and the local anti-Fascist working class.” The antifascist protesters erected barricades against the fascist march and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with Mosley’s thugs and their police escorts in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street. Undoubtedly, the Battle of Cable Street was a major anti-fascist victory, but it also shows that a call to action against fascism, which is rooted in violence and intimidation, cannot be confined to passive demonstrations. When the march of fascism becomes an actual threat, “it has to be physically challenged.”
But let us not remain in the distant past. In early August 2024, a fascist pogrom was defeated in Bristol, England, when thousands of people, young and old, came together to counter an anti-immigration rally and to show that Bristol will not tolerate fascism.
Since then, there have been many other anti-fascist protests and demonstrations all across Europe and the United States, especially as the far right now feels empowered by Trump’s return to the White House and makes no bones about the fact that it is racist and sees neofascism as a political necessity in today’s world. This was all in display in London, for example, just a couple of weeks ago, in the protest organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson and in which scores of police officers were injured while Elon Musk spoke to the fascists over a video link and urged them to use violence.
While there was little doubt before as to where Trump stood on democracy and human decency, he has made it clear with his decision to designate Antifa a “terrorist” organization that he and his coterie are clearly on the side of fascism. But if they really believe that antifascism is now dead, they are in for a rude awakening.
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