At the heart of the far right’s authoritarian project lies numerous contradictions: a small-government agenda that seeks to illegalize abortion and bodily autonomy, a push for meritocracy that ensures the least qualified hold power, a populist economic appeal that asks the least from the rich and demands the most from the poor.
For a movement that purports to conserve the founding ideals enshrined in the Constitution, the modern Republican Party, in practice, seems to view such values with contempt. When it comes to the First Amendment — the right to free speech, without fear of government retribution — perhaps the greatest contradiction is the far right’s push to ban books.
Following the authoritarian lead of President Donald Trump, Tennessee’s Secretary of State Tre Hargett, citing anti-DEI state legislation and one of the president’s executive orders, sent a letter — a thinly veiled threat — to public libraries across the state, reminding them that state and federal grants maintain much of their operations.
“Libraries receiving grant funds must comply with laws or regulations, whether they have been in place for years or have recently become effective,” Hargett wrote.
In the president’s order — a proclamation with no real legal authority — Trump, to defend women from so-called “gender ideology extremism,” called for the restoration of what the administration sees as the “biological truth” of two unchanging genders to the federal government. Tennessee’s anti-DEI law bars governmental entities from “using discriminatory preferences to promote diversity, equity or inclusion.”