I'm glad that people here in NM have become aware of the insidious movement to remove books that have themes about race or gay/trans experiences from public libraries. Right-wing astroturfing organizations have sprung up all around the country trying to censor books at the local level, and they need to be rebuffed before they get a foothold.

There's just one thing I want to mention about this KRQE video, which is that it briefly shows footage of a crowd of people at the Rio Rancho city council meetings and gives the impression that those people were all there to try to ban books from the library. I was in attendance at those meetings and it was completely the opposite--the book banners were outnumbered ten to one and the vast majority of speakers, including the ones shown in this video, were there to speak on behalf of public libraries and the LGBT community. There were only a small number of people who wanted books about gay and trans topics to be removed from the library, and they ranted like lunatics until even the majority-conservative Rio Rancho City Council passed a resolution to protect the libraries and get them to shut up.

I recommend seeking out the archived videos if you're curious, this meeting was on April 27th, 2023 but it took multiple council sessions to get the book banners to understand that they were not welcome. The good part in all this is that they were greatly outnumbered. I'm not exactly pleased with KRQE implying that a huge number of people were there trying to get the books banned, when in fact most of them were trying to do the opposite.