Amanda Jones

Steve Thomas: Amanda, thank you so much for joining me I know on the podcast today.

Amanda Jones: I am delighted to be speaking to you today.

Steve Thomas: Before we get into your more recent experiences that are the core of your book, can you share what motivated you to pursue a career in libraries in the first place?

Amanda Jones: Yes, so I’m a lifelong reader. I’ve loved books since my mom gave me the Bobbsey Twins when I was in probably first or second grade. I’ve just been an avid reader my entire life and I knew that I wanted a career where I was either teaching kids about reading, which I did for 14 years, or now I can focus on just putting the right books in the right hands. Best job in the world.

Steve Thomas: And you even named your daughter after Jo…

Amanda Jones: I did. I read Little Women in seventh grade and I knew that one day, if one day I had a daughter, I wanted to name her after Josephine March from Little Women because I wanted a child that was headstrong and kind and stubborn, but her own person. I just love that character. And I was fortunate, I have one child, so I got to name her after Jo March.

Steve Thomas: I’m glad your husband was on board with that.

Amanda Jones: Yes, and then it goes well with the last name Jones!

Steve Thomas: Oh, yeah, there you go. That’s some good alliteration going on there.

Amanda Jones: Yeah, and he’s a reader too, so he understood.

Steve Thomas: Excellent. Yeah, I think it must be hard if a librarian marries somebody who’s not a reader.

Amanda Jones: I would think so. He’s probably a bigger reader than I am, but we would do completely different styles of books that we like to read, completely opposite.

Steve Thomas: I guess you transitioned from being a teacher to being a librarian, but you knew already that you wanted to be in school libraries, and that’s what you wanted to do, right? Like, did you ever consider public libraries, or was it always kind of school libraries where you wanted to be?

Amanda Jones: It was always school libraries. I’m heading into my 24th year as an educator, but I actually as an undergrad, got permission to take all the graduate courses and things, so when I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, I was already a certified school librarian in the state of Louisiana as an undergrad. And then I went on to get my reading specialist degree. My master’s is actually in education because in Louisiana, if you want to become a director of school libraries, they don’t care so much about the MLIS. They care about the master’s in education, but yeah, my minor was in library science and I took all the grad classes, the same grad classes I would have taken anyway.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, which is so funny because I think when everybody first hears your story, even I did, I think, it’s, “Oh, she’s a public librarian because she got attacked at a public library board meeting!” But no, you were speaking as a member of the community.

Amanda Jones: Yeah, I was, I was speaking as a, at the time, 44 year resident. People do get confused ’cause I am a school librarian. I actually just went and spoke as a resident, and the people that targeted me are the ones that brought my school into it and started telling everybody, “Oh, she’s a school librarian and this is where she works!” I just went as a resident. I think it’s very important school librarians, we need to stick up for our public librarian counterparts.

Steve Thomas: And vice versa.

Amanda Jones: And vice versa, yes!

Steve Thomas: As a public librarian, we should speak up for you guys, too.

Amanda Jones: Yes, that’s my hope. If it ever comes in our school system, that the public librarians will come and speak at our school board meetings, where I would not be as free to speak as I would at the public library.

Steve Thomas: So, we’re dancing around it a little bit, but the issue at the core of your book is that you spoke up at a public library board meeting and was targeted for that. So before that point, what was your experience with censorship? Had you had much experience seeing that in a library that you’ve worked in or a school you’ve worked in?

Amanda Jones: I’ve never had any formal challenges, but I have had parents call over the years with questions about books. I successfully defended Kwame Alexander’s The Undefeated a few years prior, and it just took a conversation with the parent. I read the book to her and it wasn’t that big a deal. I’ve done some informal, there was some just informal challenges, but I had actually spoken, done several webinars and things, for AASL and for Follett and some other organizations on the topic of censorship, but it wasn’t like it is now. It seems to be all I do now is talk about censorship. Back then, two, three years ago, I had a whole variety of things I talked about.

Steve Thomas: Well, that’s what I was about to ask. Did you have a specialty in your mind before that you liked to talk about the most and now you’ve had to switch?

Amanda Jones: Yes. So I was named School Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year for my work with virtual field trips, using virtual reality to teach content standards in my school system. So I was very passionate about that and educational technology. But I’m also certified reading specialist so I really liked talking about book joy, and the harm of some of these computerized reading programs and things like that, passionate about that. And then just advocacy. I’ve been on the executive board of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians for five, six years, and I loved talking about why every school needs, or every student deserves a certified school librarian in every school. So those were the big things I used to talk about all the time.

Steve Thomas: Well, I hope you can get back to some of those eventually.

Amanda Jones: I hope so, too.

Steve Thomas: Well, hopefully with work like yours and Every Library and other people that we can get this tamped down, maybe some, and I have to talk about it all the time.

Amanda Jones: Yeah, and I’ll be honest, I don’t mind talking about it right now because it’s what’s important because if we don’t tamp all this down, we’re not going to have libraries anymore. So I don’t mind talking about it. I do hope that these people move on to something else to gripe about in the near future though, so I can go back to having a more well-rounded array of things to talk about at conferences.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Well, can you talk about that one night, what you were thinking leading up into it and then how it really didn’t go the way you thought necessarily.

Amanda Jones: So in Louisiana we have parishes not counties, and I am in a parish called Livingston, and I had been kind of eyeing. We have a neighboring parish Lafayette parish that had been the target of extremists for several years, three or four years prior, and I had been monitoring that and I noticed that someone from that same group who had been successful at helping get the Lafayette Parish Library Board overrun by extremists and they cut funding and there’s no displays and it’s just horrific. I saw a member of their community, their group, commenting in our local Facebook page, how they post a picture of a book out of context and “Everybody needs to go to the library!” I looked at the agenda and “content and signage” were on the agenda and it was like right after Pride Month, so I knew what the signage was about. I was pretty sure I knew what the content was about.

So I just went and spoke as a resident about censorship. I did identify myself as the current president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, and I did identify myself as the SLJ Librarian of the Year, cause I wanted them to know that I knew what I was talking about, but I said multiple times, I’m a resident and a mother of a child in this district. It was just a blanket censorship speech, you know, like “censorship bad” but I repeatedly said we already have policies. We already have challenge policies. People can follow the policies and procedures that are already in place, and 30 other people spoke and said the same thing as me. Only two people spoke and said the opposite of what we were saying. And that was the one guy from out of town who’s a paid extremist and then another woman who is a grandmother who I really think she really believed at the time that we had sexually explicit material in the children’s section, which we do not have.

But no, like it really went well. The meeting went well because there was no censorship. The Board shot down all of the harmful things that were proposed And they’ve continued for two years because we have a meeting, I go every two months and I’ve built a grassroots alliance and we go. We have successfully conquered every censorship attempt. And so in that sense I have succeeded in what I went out to do.

However, after that first meeting, four days later, I woke up, and I was apparently now the target of extremists. They made a meme that said, that had my photo, my first, maiden, and last name, and said I advocate teaching anal sex to 11 year olds and another one with a target around my face, that they insist is just a circle, that says I give six year old pornography and erotica. They went on to name my school. They went on to put quotes, like “It only takes five minutes to destroy someone’s reputation.” Like it was very clear what they were trying to do. But that circulated in my community and it’s been two years, and they still post about me. Not as much and they’re more careful now, cause we are still in an active lawsuit, cause I did, I filed suit. I filed three police reports. Nothing was done to protect me. So I filed a lawsuit and we’re still an active case.

Steve Thomas: And to be clear, like you said, the people who are the anti or the censorship people are not even members of your community. I mean, the old lady was, but that’s a common kind of challenge that happens a lot but the main instigators are not.

Amanda Jones: The main instigator was an out of town paid… He’s a director for a dark money nonprofit that gets paid to do this kind of thing. And then one of the guys is for my community, a neighboring town. The local yokel keyboard warrior guy, and it’s like, I live rent free in their head. I had never met these people. I still have never spoken to them. We have never interacted online, and they just posted the most horrific things about me. And they still post about me. They’re more careful though. So once I filed a lawsuit, they stopped calling me by my name and calling me “that librarian.”

So that’s why I named my book that, I took it back, That Librarian. I figured, you know, if they want me to be that librarian, I’ll do it. They wanted to silence me. They wanted me to crawl in a hole and die and be quiet, and I decided to do the exact opposite of what they wanted. It hasn’t been pleasant. I mean, I’m ostracized in my community. I live in a very small town, Louisiana. I’ve had someone follow me around and video record me, but whatever, they’re not going to silence me.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s a shame that it’s even infected people in your community that normally you’d be just saying hi to and just other band parents and everything like that.

Amanda Jones: Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of friends. I’ve seen things that people I’ve known my entire life have posted about me online, and these are people who’ve known me my whole life, and I write about that in the book, there was some people that you know, years ago, this woman told me that her child wouldn’t have graduated high school if I hadn’t helped identify a learning disability when he was in seventh grade and help get him help, and then fast forward and she’s sitting on the side in court with other people. And I just, it blows my mind. It blows my mind.

Steve Thomas: And that’s the dangerous part about this. I mean, there’s the people, the leaders of this thing that are doing it for political means or just for attention or whatever other reasons that they’re doing it, and they drag along people like that little old lady that spoke at the meeting because they convinced them that yes, there literally is pornography, as you said in the book, I think right next to the Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Amanda Jones: Yeah, and then they keep saying “Oh there’s pornography in the library.” First of all, no library, we don’t have pornography. But second of all, then they say it’s in the children’s section. What they are saying is pornography… like the other day, we successfully beat a challenge for the book. It’s called, I’m Not a Girl. It’s a picture book for ages zero to seven. There is not even the first mention of sex or anything in that. It’s an innocuous children’s book. They called it pornography because you know, any book with characters from the LGBTQIA+ community, they say are pornography. The words they use are dangerous, the lies they tell are dangerous, but not only has it affected me, our public library director resigned, our assistant library director resigned, our library workers and librarians feel just such low morale and they just feel so defeated right now because it started with the books, but what they’re continuing to do is they’re stacking the board with extremists We have a meeting next week. They’re going to add another extremist on our board.

They’re cutting our funding. We passed a millage tax renewal for our public library that funds our library, and it passed by 162 votes last November So we’re like, “Oh, yay, we won! Our library will be funded for the next 10 years!” Nope. They’re going to roll it back. They’re rolling back the millage to disregard what the voters said, and it’s going to roll down from 10 to 7 mills. And then they don’t even stop there, then they start filing legislation in the legislature and we’ve had to fight that and it’s nonstop.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, for all the arguments about, obviously the federal stuff is all important as well, but it really is that they really go hard at local levels.

Amanda Jones: That’s their plan all along. It’s very well coordinated all across the United States. You can see all of these groups are connected to each other. You can trace the group that is doing it in Louisiana to people in Arkansas, people in Texas and you trace it all back to the Heritage Foundation and all of these other organizations and these politicians that use the library as an excuse to pander for votes. They swoop in, they create this, they have their little underlings create this moral panic that that’s not a real thing. And then they swoop in with legislation and to pander for votes. And it’s really sad that they’re doing it to our libraries. They don’t seem to care much about real issues like crime and drugs and actual sexual abuse. We have some of the highest rates of sexual abuse in Louisiana and the largest perpetrators are family members and clergy. And I don’t seem to be concerned about that, not whatsoever. But we’re gonna go for the libraries. It blows my mind.

Steve Thomas: They don’t want to go after actual pornography that’s being aimed at children. There are people who are actually trying to do that. It’s like, that’s the dangerous stuff.

Amanda Jones: Yep. It kind of reminds me of what’s happening with the Olympics. There’s this controversy about a woman boxer, and my whole community’s up in arms about this female boxer that has high testosterone levels, but none of them are up in arms about the Olympic athlete who was a convicted rapist. Like there’s no, it doesn’t make sense to me what people choose to be outraged about. We have real things that we could be mad about, and we could make real change, but no, that’s not what we’re seeing.

Steve Thomas: And it leaves people like you, and then people in the LGBTQIA community as well, in danger, and then there’s casualties that they don’t care about, because they got what they wanted out of it.

Amanda Jones: And I, I used to say, I don’t understand why they’re so cruel, but someone reminded me that cruelty seems to be the point. And even though we win these battles and a lot of libraries, they’re not censoring books, but it’s the whole issue is brought before boards where they argue about the right for the LGBTQIA+’s just existence on the shelves, and it’s so demoralizing to members of the LGBTQ community. It just angers me.

Steve Thomas: And we mention that a lot, cause like, this is the public library, so there are going to be books in there that are inappropriate for children, but they’re not in the children’s section. Like, no, I don’t want my ten year old to read Fifty Shades of Grey. Please don’t.

Amanda Jones: Right, but public libraries are for like birth to death.

Steve Thomas: Everybody, right, right.

Amanda Jones: They’re for everybody, but these people that are book censors, they confuse people on purpose. Our library is split into two, we have the children’s section and we have the adult section, and there are policies at public libraries about unaccompanied minors and how old you can be and how you should monitor your own children. Like I told my now-governor, who was then attorney general in the legislature, he got up and said parents should be able to drop their 14 year old off at the library.

And I got up after him and I said, “Libraries aren’t daycares.” Would you drop them off at Walmart? I mean, I guess some of these people would…

As a parent myself, I never understood that. Like, now my child’s 17. She can go drive herself to the library, but when she was 14, 15, I mean, I went with her, and we might’ve gone our separate ways, like me to the adult section and her to the young adult section. But I was there, and then when we went to check out books, “Oh, what are you checking out?”

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I see that all the time with parents. The kids are often separate places when they come together to check out, they just flip through and look at what they got. Sometimes it’ll be like a rolling eyes, “Oh, another comic book!” or whatever, but they let them check it out still.

Amanda Jones: Yeah, I don’t get it. I grew up, my mom’s a retired kindergarten teacher. My parents are both readers and they let me read whatever I wanted growing up, and it wasn’t because they weren’t concerned or they just, they know if they tried to stop me for reading stuff, I was going to read it anyway. But I’m fine. I read Stephen King in sixth and seventh grade. I also read Little Women. This whole thing confuses me.

Steve Thomas: It does me too. But speaking of, have you ever gotten your daughter to read Little Women yet, or is she still not going to read it?

Amanda Jones: She only reads manga, so she has read the manga version, but she’s not read the unabridged original Louisa May Alcott version, but she’s read several graphic novel and manga versions. I did have her watch the movie, and she just rolled her eyes the whole time.

Steve Thomas: Oh well. Yeah, that’s one of my wife’s favorite movies, the Winona Ryder version.

Amanda Jones: Yes. Yes. I love it, but all my child reads is manga, and that’s okay with me because she’s a reader. Reading is reading.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, right, like, we try to get our son to read things other than comics just to practice, like, you’re gonna need, as an adult, to be able to read text, so I’d like you to read some outside of that. Most of what you read, I don’t care if it’s old Marvel comics, that’s fine. Every once in a while, just be able to read text.

Amanda Jones: It’s funny, because I consider myself very well read, but I didn’t read a lot of the classics growing up, like, hit or miss through the years. She’s read all of them just in manga form so she can tell you the plot of War and Peace and Count of Monte Cristo and I can’t, so she’s read all of like the classics, just the manga version and that’s okay with me.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, no, I think it’s great that they do those because that gets them to read classics when they normally, I mean, like, I don’t think I even now I want to read the Count of Monte Cristo.

So when did you really realize the severity of what was happening there cause you said after the meeting, you thought everything went well. When was the severity of when you felt like you needed to call the police and life threatening?

Amanda Jones: It was four days later. They posted at the same time, these two different men, one with the group and one, the local yokel guy, they posted the same time in the middle of the night so that it would gain traction. So that when I woke up, that was all over the entire community. It was four days later, and my phone was ringing off the hook, texts. I cried for days. After they kept on for like a week or two, they just kept on. It wasn’t just one post. It was multiple posts, mocking me, laughing, tagging my state cause that’s the time I was president of LASL. They were tagging my state association, all of these things.

So after about, I want to say like a week, I had enough and filed the first police report. They continued. I went and filed another one. And then about two or three weeks later, I got my first death threat. It was through an email. And people will say, “Oh, if it’s just on social media, just ignore it. You don’t have to read that.” But I was getting it on all platforms, even on my Goodreads and my Amazon, but it was text messages and it was emails and it was not just at me, they were doing it to my friends, my family, my 97 year old grandmother, they did it on her Facebook page. She never saw it. I happened to see it on her iPad, and I erased it before she saw it, but you can’t escape it when they’re sending it to you and you can’t escape it when you can’t even go out in your community because they’re saying things to your face. But yeah, I filed the death threat. Still nothing was done. I filed a lawsuit, and I would say I haven’t been protected by the court system either. But it was nonstop.

They bring me up in conversation. I don’t look at their stuff anymore. After about a year I had to go through intense therapy because I was having panic attacks. I lost chunks of hair. I lost 50 pounds. I got so anemic. I ended up having medical issues. I was in and out of the hospital for two months. I had to go on medical leave from work. It was awful. And my therapist was like, you have to stop looking at their stuff. And I’m like, “Well, how do I document all of this for the lawsuit?” And she’s like, “Get somebody else to.” So I have somebody else that goes and takes all the screenshots and all that and saves everything and does all that for me.

So I haven’t looked at their stuff in over a year and it’s very freeing, but it’s still out there. They’re still doing it. She documents about 15 different accounts now. They’re very, they’re vague. They’re more vague now. They use the banana emoji now to talk about me because I sound bananas. We’re not talking with like the most mature people. Are we two years old? But I’m trying to take that back too. I bought banana-themed clothing, and when we defeated two bills, I went to go speak on it. They all sat behind me in the legislature, and we successfully defeated the two bills. And so, you know, I’m probably immature too. I pulled out a banana and started eating it. I’m petty too. I try not to be though.

It’s really hard because as much as they post about me, I don’t post about them, and well, like one time I did, because one of them acted a fool at a library board meeting, and I was like, “That was insane.” but I’ve never, like, called them out by name and said, these are the men. I don’t get into that because I try to go with what Michelle Obama said about when they go low, you go high, and also, these people are all about, they lie and say they’re trying to protect children, but they’re not protecting children. They’re teaching children horrible examples of how to behave and act in life. I am an educator, and I do have kids that look up to me, so I cannot act a fool on social media. Not that I want to, but I cannot act a fool. I want to set a better example than these people are setting.

And maybe they want to set bad examples for their own children, because they have their own children. If they want to teach their children that that’s acceptable behavior, that’s on them. But my child’s not going to learn that behavior and think that that’s acceptable for my actions.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Was that a difficult conversation that you had to have to explain the situation to your daughter? And to your family, I guess, too?

Amanda Jones: Yes, my daughter was 15 at the time when it first started. And she is on social media, so I knew she was going to see this meme saying her mom teaches 11 year olds how to perform anal sex. So I had to sit her down and that was embarrassing. It was mortifying. But then my child was like, “Well, no duh, you’re not doing that, Mom.” She’s like, “You’re my librarian. I was one of your students. I know you don’t do that.” And I was like, “I know, but I have to show you.” And she Googles me. And they write blog posts about me where they lie, and they say all these things about me and she reads it and I had to have conversations with her about what’s truth and what’s not, and the validity of websites and things like that, things that I teach the students anyway, and bias and all of that.

But yeah, it’s embarrassing. Had to tell my grandmother about having a death threat. And like, I mean, it’s horrific. Nobody wants to have that conversation with their parents.

Steve Thomas: No, no. And with all those attacks, what kind of support did you get from like the librarian community and the better people in your community?

Amanda Jones: The support has been amazing and I say that like for every death threat I’ve had, I’ve had a thousand messages of support. People I’ve never met have sent me flowers to my school. They’ve sent me care packages. And at one point I was scared to open those at school because you never know what’s in a box, but people were sending me, I only got good gifts. I didn’t get anything, like no severed heads in a box. Every time I got a box, I was thinking about that movie Seven, like “What’s in the box??”

But so many former students, because I’m entering my 24th year, so I have students that I started when I was 22, and they were, my first students were 14, so, you know, they’re in their mid 30s now, so I have a lot of former students in their mid 30s or late 20s that have contacted me to tell me thank you, some even referred to me by my maiden name. And they’ll say, “Remember we did this lesson and remember we did this?” and I’ll say, “Yeah, I remember that.” And there’ll be 32. And then after they go through that, they’ll say, “Hey, I just, I ended up, I came out when I was in my 20s, and I’m in a same sex marriage and thank you for doing what you’re doing for the community.”

And so, like, I focus on the good, these people that I’ve helped because the haters can’t say that they’ve changed anybody’s lives for the better. When all you put out is hate and meanness, they can’t say they have kids, which are now in their late 20s and early 30s, contacting them saying, “You changed my life and thank you.” They don’t have that. I’ve gotten name called at my daughter’s events, but I’ve had her friends and other people in the community come up to me and say, “Thank you. Thank you for being a voice of reason at that library board meeting. Thank you for standing up for marginalized communities.” And even if it was just one, it’s been dozens, but if it had been one, just one would have been worth it. Even if it had been nobody that ever said that, it’d still be worth it.

Steve Thomas: But it does help to have that, especially in your darker days, I’m sure that you’re feeling really down and that have nice letters coming in. When your lawsuit started, you had a GoFundMe that covered all of your legal bills, I think, right?

Amanda Jones: Yeah, I’ve spent about $60,000 on my lawsuit so far, with no end in sight. We probably have another couple of years. The thing is though, if I lose, ultimately, I have to then turn around and pay their court costs and their fees. So like, as of now, I have like $130,000 in my GoFundMe, which sounds like a huge, it is a huge amount to me. I’m just hoping it covers it if I lose. Am I going to have to mortgage my house? And then pay my defamers for defaming me? And they’ll crow about it if they ultimately win, they’ll crow about it and they’ll be like, “Ha ha, loser!” or whatever they call me all the time.

But to me, I already won. It doesn’t matter what the court says. I’ve already won because I stood up for myself. We teach our students, and I teach my child that when you’re being bullied, whether it’s online or in person, you should speak out and you should tell the people in charge and do what you need to do. The people in charge didn’t help me, so I’m doing what I need to do, and I already won, and no matter the cost, maybe other people will stand up as well. I ultimately hope that I do win, not for myself, but that it’ll set a precedent because mine was the very first court case of this nature, defamation of a public school librarian, and I wanted to set a precedent that people just can’t get online and make up lies about educators, but it is what it is. I’m learning to take the good with the bad and just focus more on the good and make lemonade out of lemons.

Steve Thomas: Well, and to be clear, you know, we’re talking about $60,000, $100,000. Tell the listeners what it is that you’re seeking in the lawsuit. Is it millions of dollars that you want from these gentlemen?

Amanda Jones: One dollar and an apology. That’s it. Which they’ll post as, “She’s seeking fame and fortune!” and I just, I’m seeking a dollar, and if I do end up winning, they’ll have spent a lot more than a dollar on their own court costs and all they had to do was apologize from the get go. I’d end it today if they gave me, they wouldn’t even have to give me the dollar, if they gave me an apology. They tried to settle early on. I want to be clear that what I’m asking for is a public apology, and they tried to settle early on with me for a private apology, and I said, “No, it’s going to be a public, video recorded apology, or it’s going to be nothing.” All I’m asking for is a public apology and a dollar.

Steve Thomas: They’re also spending tons of money on their lawyers and stuff too, having to do all this. So it’s like, them refusing to just give you a public apology is spending their money too. Like, at the end of it, you’re both going to have spent a bunch of money.

Amanda Jones: Yeah, and they keep saying she’s rich. She’s made $130,000 on GoFundMe. Well, first of all, that’s not how GoFundMes work. You can’t just spend money on yourself and what you want. But I have been very clear about the fact that it’s in an account and it only is spent on legal fees. And when all of this is said and done, every single penny of that that has not been spent on my legal defense fund will go directly to the Every Library organization to help others like me, every single penny of it. I’m not keeping a dime of that GoFundMe for myself.

Steve Thomas: You’re not going to buy a banana-colored Ford Mustang and then screech out of the parking lot of the courthouse?

Amanda Jones: I might with my book advance, not the GoFundMe. But yeah, that’s the rumor now is I’m getting rich. This one book is not getting me rich. And that GoFundMe is not going to me personally at all. It’s going to attorneys and then Every Library.

Steve Thomas: You talked about you went to therapy. Is there any other ways that you have, like, just as examples for people who might go through this kind of thing, how you managed your mental and your physical health while dealing with all this harassment?

Amanda Jones: It took me a year to figure it out and to get a hold of it. But therapy was huge. I do a lot of meditating, just laying and deep breathing and focusing. I started yoga, which helped a lot, but because of medical issues, I had to stop yoga for a while. And then a lot of playlists, music playlists, and a lot of venting to friends, surrounding myself with positive people, not looking at the Facebook posts. You know, I have a book coming out. I’m not even going to look at the reviews because I know the haters are going to get in there and write awful things.

I’m not going to look at anything written about me. You just can’t. You can’t argue back on social media with anybody. It’s not good for your health. And if you are faced with this in public, you can’t argue back in public. It solves nothing. But lots of therapy. I was on anxiety medication that I’ve weaned myself off of. But I am religious. They’ll tell you I’m some kind of, you know, I’m burning common sense and morals on the “altar of woke-ism.” I am a Christian, and I pray and that helps me. So if you’re religious, do that. If you’re not, don’t. But find and surround yourself with good people. I’ve surrounded myself with really good people.

Steve Thomas: Well, they obviously wouldn’t agree with this, but I think Jesus was probably pretty woke.

Amanda Jones: You know, they keep saying, they use religion as a weapon in my community. They’re like, she’s an atheist or whatever, and no offense to atheists, cause my husband is one and whatever, but I’m not, and I will counter with, I was raised Southern Baptist. I don’t necessarily align with the Southern Baptist faith, but I was raised that God is love and that we love one another and that Jesus loved everyone, and so I’m doing the way I was raised as a Christian to be. They’re the ones not acting like the way, at least the way I was raised, that Christians should act.

Steve Thomas: Well, that reminds me of something else that you had in the book and in your story, that they’re trying to target you and paint you as this super radical leftist person. And like, you grew up in the South, and so you almost certainly grew up conservative Christian.

Amanda Jones: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I grew up very Republican, and I’ll quickly tell people, it’s not the Republican party of today, the hate, I was not raised around hate. I was raised with the love your country and you know, all of that I’ve been in a registered Republican my entire life. Have I voted that way the past few years? No, no, I have not, and I probably do need to go and change my voters registration card but, I have been raised my entire life as a Republican. And I would say I’m middle of the road. I’m not so far left or far right. People have made human rights political, and I think that is not okay to weaponize human rights, the LGBTQIA+ community, women’s rights, and the libraries for God’s sake, that should be a nonpartisan issue, and it’s been weaponized by the alt right. My parents are Republican and I tell them, you know, cause they don’t agree with book bans, and I said, well, you need to tell the alt right faction in your own party that they’re not acting like traditional Republicans. And you know, it’s conversations that are tough with my parents.

And it’s the same people, what they’re doing now to the LGBTQ community is the same people that were doing this to doctors and healthcare workers in 2020 and “COVID’s not real” and the jab and the vax and they were doing this to the health care community and then they switched for a little bit to solely just focus on teachers for a while there and then now it’s like the LGBTQ community and anyone who stands up for them.

Growing up my best friend is gay. He’s been my best friend since forever, and he’s gay. He came out when we were in college and I saw how he was treated growing up because it was obvious, he’ll tell you now it was obvious, but he was mistreated and he had to move and leave and live in a whole other state to find happiness. He was in my wedding party, and my family embraced him. But then now I’ve heard people that were at my wedding who embraced him then, talk about the gay agenda. And I’m like, do you think he has one? And they’re like, no. Just live and let live. It’s not bothering you. I’ll never understand, I don’t think, why people choose to have such hate in their hearts. And I’ve been told it’s because there’s fear and there’s something lacking in their own lives, and I get it on one hand, but on the other hand, that’s no excuse.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I feel the same thing. It’s just they’re filling that hole in their life with this instead because it’s just visceral, I guess, and so there’s something to it. But ultimately, long term, like you said, they’re not going to have somebody 20 years from now say you changed my life from helping me learn to read back then. “You changed my life by teaching me to hate gay people.” It’s like, no, nobody’s going to say that.

Amanda Jones: And I have such strong hope for the future because the kids are okay. The kids are wonderful, and I’m not talking about my students. I’m just talking about children in general and we have a brighter future ahead of us as long as there are adults that set good positive examples, and they don’t learn from those that are just espousing hate. People say, “Oh, I’m just one person.” Yeah, but I heard author Kekla Magoon one time say Kekla Magoon say you know, individually, we’re just one raindrop, but together we can be a mighty storm. So those of us who are able, cause not everybody’s able to speak out, I get that, but I am in a place of privilege and I am able to speak out. So it takes people that can speak out, need to speak out, and that’s how I was raised.

Steve Thomas: Well I’m glad you’re managing to, I’m sure it took a while, but get back to a good positive mindset. I know we’re talking like right before the school year starts, and so you’re getting all prepped for that so hopefully that’s a good positive thing that you’re doing. Is there anything you’re looking forward to in this coming school year that you’re wanting to really accomplish?

Amanda Jones: So it’s been two years since I’ve been targeted, and the first year, it was like dead man walking at work until I took medical leave and last year, I was just kind of like in the motions. This year, I’m excited. I think I’m 100 percent back to as normal as I’ll ever be, and I am really looking forward to getting back into the book talks with the kids and keeping up because when you have so much going on mentally, you don’t get to read as much so I wasn’t able to keep up with as much as the middle grade books. Kids would ask me and I was going blank on book recommendations. So I’m looking forward to getting back into that, putting the right books in the right hands and more author visits and just book joy this year. I’m really excited to get back with the kids.

Steve Thomas: And hopefully, of course, your lawsuit continues to go well into the future.

Amanda Jones: And if it doesn’t, I’m resigned, like, whatever,

Steve Thomas: But you did what you wanted to do. I mean, you brought attention to the issue.

Amanda Jones: And I’m still bringing attention to the issue. There’s two upcoming film projects that I can’t really talk about, but I have two upcoming film projects coming out in the next year, my book is coming out on August 27th, and I’m really proud of it and I’ll continue talking about it, censorship in libraries, as long as I need to.

Steve Thomas: Are you in the next Marvel movie? Is that why you can’t talk about it?

Amanda Jones: I wish. That would be really fun. They need a librarian character.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, they do. There you go! So I’m going to wrap up. We do some little lightning round questions at the end here. So the first question is, what was your first favorite book?

Amanda Jones: Gosh, first favorite book. I have a ton, but I’ll throw out there the Boxcar Children. When I was eight, I wanted to live in a boxcar and go to the dump, and just, I loved the Boxcar Children. I remember just being so obsessed with that when I was little.

Steve Thomas: It’s so funny that that’s the lesson that people get from that. “I want to go live in a boxcar!”

Amanda Jones: Live in a boxcar and go to the dump and go to the store and buy my cheese and bread….

Steve Thomas: What are you reading now?

Amanda Jones: I just bought the book The Women. I think it’s Kristin Hannah. I haven’t started it yet. I just bought that. I’m hoping to start it hopefully today, maybe. And I just finished reading Mike Hixenbaugh’s They Came for the Schools. Our books are very similar in the fact that it’s like the same alt right, Christian nationalism. It was an amazing, amazingly horrific book. It’s very well written. You can tell he’s like an actual journalist author. Like my book is just me writing from the heart, writing how I talk, but his book is just amazing, and I really recommend that book to everybody.

Steve Thomas: Okay, great. And then the last question is, which librarian stereotype is the most true for you?

Amanda Jones: I do wear cardigans. And I do have a cat. I don’t wear my hair in a bun though.

Steve Thomas: You don’t have the little things on your glasses to hold them on.

Amanda Jones: No, I thought about it though, because I was knocking my glasses off all the time. I thought about it. I was like, that’s too much, too much for me.

Steve Thomas: Well, thank you, Amanda, so much for coming on the podcast and telling all the listeners about your story, and I hope they do go out and get your book, That Librarian. And then what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you if they wanted to share their story with you or follow up with anything?

Amanda Jones: I have a website, librarianjones.com, and it has a way to reach me. I have a mailing address on there and a way to contact me, whether it’s for the book for publicists or whether it’s booking an event or just emailing me, and then I can be found on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Steve Thomas: Great, thank you so much, Amanda.

Amanda Jones: Thank you. Thank you so much. It was an honor speaking with you.