Who Is Lori the Librarian, The New Idol of The Book Banners?
Book banners have created a new superhero for their campaign. Her powers? Bigotry, cruelty, and vandalism.
Most folks don’t swim in the waters of book censorship as much as I do. Over the years, watching these groups develop new tools to shape and spread their agenda has led to being able to predict pretty accurately what’s to come. It’s never anything new. It’s the same content repackaged in a different way.
In 2021, 2022, and 2023, numerous short- and long- form “documentaries” passed among these crowds highlighted the so-called evils of critical race theory (CRT), comprehensive sexuality education (CSE, and yes, it’s sexuality, not sexual), and social emotional learning (SEL). Titles of those videos include The Mind Polluters, Whose Children Are They?, Schoolhouse Rocked, In His Image, Killing Ed, The War On Children, and more. Other creations from far right’s anti-education and anti-book proponents include a lengthy segment from Glenn Beck called “Project Groomer” and the New Discourse podcast’s “The Social Emotional Learning Bait and Switch.”
Since those early years of the book banning and public institutional destabilization efforts, the language around how these people describe what they’re doing and who their enemies are has changed. We’re not seeing CRT as the enemy anymore, nor are we seeing instances of CSE or SEL as the problem. It’s now diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a nice way to broadly toss in any topic that doesn’t lionize the cishet, rich, able-bodied, conservative Christian, white male. It’s now gender ideology as a nice way to call out anything that hints of truths beyond the male and female sexes. Even suggesting gender exists, let alone is a continuum, is ideology enough and worthy of targeting."*
As for the books previously captured under the banner SEL, they’re now simply called inappropriate. It’s a convenient label that undermines the federal standard of the Miller Test used to determine obscenity because what’s “inappropriate” isn’t necessarily obscene. It’s inconvenient facts and truths. The book banning cult bends over backwards to say that it is perfectly legal to demand removal of “inappropriate” books because of the Ginsberg vs. New York Supreme Court case. Books can be “inappropriate” for children, even if they don’t rise to the definition of obscene.
With those pat new descriptions workshopped and refined over the last four years, there’s now a new series of resources being pushed to and by this genital-obsessed crowd. But rather than demand their followers’ attention or thoughtful engagement, the same propaganda and bigotry from earlier is being repackaged in cartoon form to meet the ten second attention span of those they wish to indoctrinate.
Lori the Librarian launched in late July of this year.+ The site claims Lori is “a devoted mom and defender of truth who protects young minds, preserves kids’ innocence, and promotes literature that celebrates life, liberty, and truth,” and she aims to “equip and empower parents to protect our kids.” (There’s that curious “our” again as it relates to children, as if Lori’s creator and sycophants actually care about my child, your child, or children more broadly).
Lori the Librarian is a superhero. Her power? Defeating the so-called evils out to influence and indoctrinate “our” children. In the first episode of the video series, Lori finds her way into a public school classroom, where so-called indoctrination is happening. The teacher on the left is rendered as a ridiculous stereotype pushed by the right; the teacher, whose gender is not presented stereotypically, has pink hair and a shirt with a pot leaf. Beside her, a clown who was a guest speaker in the classroom. The clown was invited to talk about being yourself to the students.
Take a gander at the walls of the classroom while you’re at it. There are two different rainbow flags, a Black Lives Matter sign, and a poster that apparently celebrates professional institutions like the American Library Association and National Education Association. Sandwiched between the organizations is the Read Across America program. It’s utterly ridiculous.
As Ryan Estrada points out on Bluesky, “The book banners' superhero committing a crime by defacing her neighbor's little free library to make sure kids know they are not loved, kind, capable, brave, radiant, strong, beautiful, smart, awesome, unstoppable, or enough.”
The cartoon is meant to mimic the video propaganda and lies being spread by another darling of the right: PragerU. PragerU, which has begun to infiltrate public school curricula in states like Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, and others, is a right-wing media company whose “educational” videos make light of slavery, among other things. The right-wing media company is the definition of mis- and dis- information.
Lori is built from that very mode, making her easily digestible to the same crowd. Where the right has made it their mission to kill off actual educational tools like Sesame Street (it’s DEI), it’s not because they don’t want kids to have access to learning materials. It’s because they want to be the creators and purveyors of that material so they can cash in, too.
As of this week, Lori’s website promises eight videos in its series on how your children are being targeted. Some are full length, while others are trailers for what’s to come.
You get a little of everything you’d expect even from those trailers. Images of books like The Hate U Give and The Black Friend. Images of a clown in the library pulling a wagon of “gender ideology” books. A nice promotion for the right-wing publisher Brave Books and it’s annual “See You at the Library” event.
"These are the perfect books to smash the patriarchy, and de-center whiteness." "Not so fast, you brainwashing socialist!" The show teaches kids that the American Library Association, the National Endowment of the Arts, and Scholastic are enemies of the people. These people are parodies of humans
— Ryan Estrada (@ryanestrada.com) 2025-07-30T01:20:59.611Z
You can also peep the stellar lineup of Lori’s supporters, a veritable clown car of book banners from across the country.
Lori’s recommended books are something, too. She approves of 15 titles, including Frog & Toad–characters coded as queer and created by a queer author, something Lori would loathe if she were able to read–and Charlotte’s Web, a book that Texas educators are struggling to even get approval for under their state’s tyrannical book legislation. There’s nary a title to be found published after 2010 and certainly no books by authors of color. The two books which to wade into race are written by white ladies, The Indian in the Cupboard and To Kill a Mockingbird.
We know what Lori the Librarian is, but who is Lori? Who is pretending to be a brown woman coming to rescue “our” children from public school educators and librarians?
The answer is exactly what you might expect.
Copyright of Lori and her material belongs to Dan Goeller Music, Inc. Dan Goeller and his wife Heidi are from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and run an organization called Harmony South Dakota. Harmony provides music education to students to help “[develop] a child’s self-discipline, self-confidence, concentration, coordination, emotional awareness, patience, cooperation, imagination, and cognition.” Their program is inspired by El Sistema, a Venezuelan project that teaches music to some of the country’s poorest children, including those who are Brown and Black.
Dan’s distaste for public goods isn’t limited to schools and libraries. He’s spent a lot of time in the last few years challenging the Sioux Empire United Way (SEUW). The reasons why encapsulate everything about the right’s agenda. It’s a lot of nonsense packaged with language copped from social media and right-wing political darlings who don’t care a cent for the average follower but whose careers are fully fueled by them.
SEUW has provided the vast majority of funding for Dan and Heidi’s Harmony South Dakota program. In 2023, the board of Harmony, with plenty of input from Dan, were opposed to the reporting requirements the SEUW asked in exchange for funds–specifically, issues Harmony deemed to be DEI in nature and therefore, inappropriate. A massive misinformation campaign ensued thanks to Dan, spreading falsehoods about the data being collected by SEUW, what that information would be used for, and more. This directly impacted SEUW and the other dozens of organizations which SEUW funds. Dan was talking to anyone who would listen and found plenty of support from local far-right affiliates.
Two years on, Dan is still spreading lies and misinformation about the SEUW. In July of this year, he complained about how the nonprofit was being treated favorably by Minnehaha County because employees of the county had the option of making regular donations to the SEUW as part of their paychecks. This is common practice in municipalities nationwide.**
Dan worked as the director of a (former?) publishing company called Noteworthy Books. The company produced one picture book and CD product, a rendition of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale “The Friendly Giant.” Quite a choice for someone who would probably be embarrassed to learn that Oscar Wilde wasn’t a nice straight white Christian boy.
Both Dan and Heidi are also affiliated with Ligonier Ministries, thanks to a CD they produced for the organization in 2008. Ligonier is a reformed Christian ministry and one of their arms is production of educational materials to support their messages and beliefs. But those aren’t the most interesting parts of the organization–people publish through religious institutions all the time.
What’s interesting is the story of R. C. Sproul Jr., son of Ligonier’s founder and a former employee of the ministries. Sproul Jr. was caught visiting Ashley Madison’s website and suspended from Ligonier from September 2015 until July 2016. It was the same era when another well-known upstanding white conservative Christian named Josh Duggar was caught doing the same–and they weren’t the only two “model” men whose internet cheating was documented.
It wouldn’t be much longer before Sproul Jr. was forced to resign entirely from Ligonier. He claimed to be leaving in December 2016 due to “personal reasons”; those reasons were discovered to be that he was arrested for drunk driving with a minor in the car with him.
People like Sproul Jr. are the very types that individuals affiliated with book banners and the lies about librarian and educator “grooming” treat as leaders. Such finger pointing is more often about those making up the lies than anything else.
In the years since videos depicting actual professionals as groomers and the content in libraries as “pornographic” or “inappropriate” came in vogue, there’s been a separate and related passion topic for this cult: human trafficking. Since 2019, the right has created and amplified rhetoric how rampant and widespread human trafficking is. Suburban white women filmed teary videos for social media talking about how they almost got trafficked at Wal-Mart and that they found “weird things” by their cars. The 2023 movie Sound of Freedom saw these people showing up in theaters to talk about how important it was (and then crying online about how the film was being suppressed by the mainstream even though it was making so much money).++ The numbers cited about the rates of human trafficking incidents in the United States were absolute lies and unbelievable to anyone with the sense to pause for one moment and use their own brains. That was intentional–the movie, the short form videos, the social media posts bolstered by the “mysterious” algorithm–worked to build a story about an issue that was not true. Karen was not getting trafficked at Wal-Mart. Trafficking is real, but it’s not this.
Trafficking was a topic that made the groomer rhetoric palatable.
Trafficking allowed the people pushing the lies about inappropriate content, as well as teachers and librarians indoctrinating “our” young people, to cover up actual child trafficking, grooming, and sexual crimes committed by Epstein and his associates.
The party of book bans and genital fixation isn’t here to protect “(y)our” kids. They’re here to protect their own from the decades of scandal plaguing their repressive and narrow way of life. This isn’t about Christianity or the Bible, two institutions where social justice and care for all are central values. It’s about protecting the symbols of an institution that doesn’t exist while simultaneously pretending that that institution is infallible. It’s showing a happy Christian family on reality TV through one lens while the parents beat their children off screen.
Which brings us back to Lori.
Dan and Heidi built Harmony South Dakota to provide access to music for young people in Sioux Falls and build community around a shared love of that music. Their background is in their faith. Yet, here are those same people calling other educators and librarians in their community some of the ugliest and cruel names imaginable. They’re putting themselves on a pedestal and making it clear that they see themselves as the ones worthy of worship and praise. Idols and models to be followed because their way–and only their way–is the truth and the light.
All of this is being done while Dan attacks a local nonprofit that’s helped fund their program for most of its time in existence. A nonprofit whose mission is to address and help support community initiatives and programs, keeping money and talent local.
Then there’s the hypocrisy. Harmony was developed under the guise of inspiration from El Sistema, a Venezuelan program specifically developed to help the poorest of the poor. And despite being white presenting themselves, Dan and Heidi chose to make their Lori the Librarian a brown woman. Aren’t these things DEI?
Those crying groomer and creating materials that villainize entire professions are the people we should be most worried about sending “our” children to be around. Their hatred is a disease that they refuse to vaccinate for and that they’re excited to spread to the next generations. Their “freedom” comes at the expense of everyone else. Their righteousness and “spiritual battle” flies in the face of the very Bible and religion to which they claim devotion.
Every single kid deserves better than Lori.
Every single kid deserves better than any of this.
Notes
*My book Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World is currently being targeted in two Florida school districts following its successful banning by Bruce in Clay County Schools earlier this summer. One of the reasons cited for it being inappropriate is that it discusses gender as a thing. Here’s one of the reasons the complainer cited for the book being inappropriate in schools:
+Lori is not seeing the social media success of other initiatives in the past. Her Facebook posts are getting circulated in the same anti-literature groups that such material has always been shared in, but her page only has 240 or so followers. Her videos are racking up viewership numbers in the tens, many of which are simply folks screenshotting to showcase how ridiculous they are. Dan and Heidi spent real time and money to do this, rather than get actual hobbies.
**The United Way is one of the major nonprofits that help support Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program, which sends free books to children ages birth to 5 every single month. It’s likely not a coincidence that the Imagination Library has been targeted with funding cuts by states like Indiana–it’s part of the ongoing attempts to not just ban books (even though enrollment in the program is optional) and part of the ongoing effort to color nonprofits like the United Way, which put DEI at the forefront of what they do, as “bad.”
++The only thing that matters is the pay out.
Here’s a reminder that this fall is a busy season for me, as I’ve booked several speaking and workshop sessions nationwide. While I will still write here where and how I can, it may not be at the biweekly cadence I try to maintain.