The slogan calling for Marxism’s “long march through the institutions” is commonly attributed to Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who coined it in the 1920s to spread Marxist ideology throughout the West. In 1967, German socialist Rudi Dutschke adopted it to promote the subversion of capitalist countries by becoming part of the government as well as by infiltrating the professions. Many authors have documented the effectiveness of these efforts in the U.S., particularly in the realm of higher education.

One outgrowth of such endeavors is “recency bias,” or the preference of recent events, works, and experiences over those of the past. Greek writer and lecturer, Kassiani Nikolopoulou, defined recency bias in an article on Scribbr in 2023 as “the tendency to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences or the latest information we possess when estimating future events. Recency bias often misleads us to believe that recent events can give us an indication of how the future will unfold.”

Recency bias can occur in almost any area of human enterprise, such as the art world, employment evaluation, sports, and in library collection management — the selection, acquisition, and preservation of library books and materials. As one commenter opined on reddit: “It seems a lot of quality [literature] out there is hidden by recency bias and a lack of online presence.” He was referring to the lack of information available in general as well as online, but libraries are also impacted. The management of library book collections today appears to be driven by a DEI and LGBT-fueled recency bias.

Of particular significance is the impact on children’s books. As one observer explained, the likelihood is that this bias provides “a clever strategy to get rid of classic children’s literature and replace it with Captain Underpants or worse.”

Ironically, the notion of “reducing bias” in library collection management typically means implementing recency bias, or the replacement of classical literature with books that exude the woke ideologies of the Left. This philosophy is spelled out in an online article titled Examining and Reducing Bias in Libraries — Working in Library Access Services, which states in part:

• In your library work, you are likely to see an acronym like DEI or IDEA as short-hand for library workers’ efforts to remove barriers that affect some patrons and employees more than others because they are barriers created by racism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, and other biases that are built into libraries in the United States.

The balance of the article explains how library workers can modify “library spaces, services, and collections” [emphasis added], to modify or eliminate these “barriers.”

In children’s literature, recency bias displaces uplifting tales of physical and moral courage, exploration, adventure, historical authenticity, and patriotism, and replaces them with dark-themed stories of sexual deviance, suicide, divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, and more. Many also contain sexually explicit content. The fact that so many examples of pornographic “children’s” books have surfaced in recent years is demonstrative of recency bias in action in both public and school libraries.

A few of these books have been described in Education Reporter. (See for example, the August 2022 and March 2023 issues.)

Biden Administration promoted porn to children

Veteran author and investigator, Thomas Hampson, pointed out in a February 2025 article for the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) that the Biden Administration seized on a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Atlanta Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in 2022 to promote porn to children. The complaint alleged that the Forsyth County, GA schools “violated Title IX and Title VI by removing certain books with sexually explicit content from the school libraries.” Since the books in question were all LGBT themed, the complainants charged that removal of the books created a “hostile environment” for LGBT youth.

At issue were the following titles: All Boys Aren’t Blue, Nineteen Minutes, The Bluest Eye, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, all of which were rated “Not for Minors” by Book Looks, a website set up by concerned parents “frustrated by the lack of resource material for content-based information regarding books accessible to children and young adults.” The group says it takes no money and is not affiliated with any other group.

According to Book Looks, each of the contested titles include themes and topics unfit for minors, among them explicit sex, assault, profanity, racism, and other inappropriate content.

The Forsyth County schools’ complaint was ultimately dismissed by the local OCR, but the DC headquarters promptly reversed that decision. Writes Hampson: “Rather than fight the government in court, the local school board signed a resolution agreement with the OCR in May 2023.”

Emboldened by this victory, President Biden appointed a “book ban coordinator for the OCR” in the person of Matt Nosanchuk, a lawyer who had worked on Obama’s presidential campaigns and later served in his administration in various capacities. One of Nosanchuk’s positions was as a “point person on LGBT rights issues” for the Obama Justice Department.

Later, Biden tapped him to serve in the education department’s OCR. Observes the IFI: “There is no question that it was porn that the OCR was protecting.”

Court actions to protect kids

The IFI points out that a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court ruling sought to protect children from obscene materials in Ginsberg v. New York, in which the defendant, a store owner, was convicted of selling adult magazines to a minor. The court ruling established “different obscenity standards for minors than are used for adults.”

Writing for the 6-3 majority in the case, Justice William Brennan asserted that “the government has a legitimate interest in protecting minors from exposure to material that might harm their moral, emotional, or intellectual development.” While Ginsberg did not disturb the First Amendment rights of adults, it struck a balance between those rights and the duty of the state to protect children, who, as Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “were not possessed of a full capacity for individual choice.”

The case affirmed the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit, but it also maintained that “the state has a complementary role in ensuring children’s welfare and protecting them from harmful influences.”

In a current case, the Supreme Court is considering whether parents in Montgomery County, Maryland should have the right to opt their children out of LGBT themed instruction in the public schools that conflicts with their religious beliefs.

These parents are seeking “a guaranteed exemption from the classroom reading of storybooks with LGBTQ themes, including same-sex marriage and exploration of gender identity.” The children in question are elementary school age.

Fueled by teachers’ union advocacy, the school district withdrew its previous policy of allowing parents to opt their kids out of such lessons and readings, insisting that “the opt-out program had become unwieldy and ran counter to values of inclusion.”

ABC News quoted Justice Brett Kavanaugh on April 22 as saying he did not understand “how it came to this” in the county where he’d been a lifelong resident. "I’m surprised that this is the hill we’re going to die on, in terms of not respecting religious liberty.”

In late January, the New York Post reported that the Trump Administration fired Biden’s book ban coordinator, eliminating the position and dismissing “numerous complaints related to the removal of ‘age-inappropriate’ and ‘sexually explicit’ literature from public schools.” The Trump USDOE argued that the Biden Administration had “amplified the false narrative that removing books violated students’ civil rights, leading to the complaints.”

Craig Trainor, the USDOE’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights under Trump, said in a statement: “By dismissing these complaints and eliminating the position and authorities of a so-called ‘book ban coordinator,’ the department is beginning the process of restoring the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children’s education.”

Sexually explicit ‘children’s’ books in school libraries

According to IFI, many public and school libraries take policy direction from the American Library Association (ALA) which they acknowledge “has shifted so far left in its ideology that it now purports children should have access to ALL information regardless of the content or age of the child.” [Emphasis in original.]

In 2023, Illinois lawmakers passed IL HB2789, the Library Systems Book Banning law, which was pushed by the Illinois Library Association, the Illinois ACLU, Planned Parenthood, LGBT activists, and individual government schools and libraries. Signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, it “prohibits the practice of banning specific books or resources” using as a stick the loss of state funding. “In other words,” says IFI, “if any library in Illinois is responsive to parents’ objections - parents whose very taxes pay for that library to exist - those tax dollars could be withheld by the state.”

A recent report from IFI Director of Operations, Kathy Valente, reveals the shockingly graphic material to which children, including elementary-age students, are exposed in both public and school libraries in their state and across the country. While the more offensive descriptions are excluded here, a sampling of the 800 inappropriate children’s books available to minors in many school libraries and the children’s sections of public libraries are shown in the sidebar.

Additional books are included in Valente’s review, all of which contain explicit sexual themes, some accompanied by graphic depictions of sex acts. Others foment racism, violence, and other inappropriate topics.

As author Hampson rhetorically asks: “Why would anyone want a child to be exposed to such unwholesome subjects? Why would anyone fight for children’s right to access such material?” He further notes that, while the Trump Administration’s efforts to stem the tide are very positive, the next administration “can come in and rehire Nosanchuk or someone like him to force schools to make pornography available to all students.”

Hampson’s long-term solution is for ordinary citizens to take control of their local and state governments. “That means supporting people with common sense who support the founding principles of our country,” he writes, “people who model biblical principles and values, people who are leaders and work well with others.”

It also means combatting at the highest levels the recency bias in our institutions that is entrenched as a result of decades of concerted efforts by the Left. Many recognize the urgent necessity to right the ship of state that has been so long subverted, and it appears we may have help from the Trump Administration, as it works to reverse the progressive course of recent administrations.

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