“Rather than focus on what their kids are actually reading, these parents often take their lead from social media pages and conservative organizations that list which books to target and provide talking points, as well as screenshots of school library catalogs. Parents’ outrage may be genuine, but their actions create an even more hostile environment for already marginalized kids.”

Crowdsourcing our outrage like this is a hugely destructive behavior, and yet it’s one that both “teams” engage in regularly. News sources on both sides are in the business of telling you what will make you engage the most, and usually that’s whatever makes you the angriest. You really do need to look into things for yourself. When you do you’ll often find that there’s way more nuance there than you thought, no matter how straightforward the original reporting seemed to be. If you can’t spare the time to do that, you have no business engaging in activism pertaining to that topic.