Hello, there I'm Chuck Todd and this is the Chuck Todd cast.

The fight over what students learn in school is now on the front lines of the culture war

but the fight takes many more.

In some communities it's battle over so-called critical race theory in other places it

focuses on masking and in others it centers on gender and sexual education.

Our new season of Meet the Press reports launches this week on NBC News Now and I'm

DeCon and we're focusing on this battle with report from my colleague Kate Snow

she went down to Florida where there are competing parent activist groups and

they've brought some traditional political campaigning down to the ground level

on these issues one of the theaters of this education debate focuses on what

students read.

In the last few years we've seen an upticking communities trying to ban books

from libraries in curriculum so to help us understand the scope of the trend

my guest today is Emily Knox an associate professor at the University of

Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the author of Book Baning in the 21st century

America Emily welcome to the Todd cast.

So I believe before we booked you before yet another incident this week down in

Texas where we got some leak audio and I guess it was what was stark about it

was how unsuddle it was in the conversation and I don't know if you caught exactly

what the superintendent said but he had a gathering of librarians and he said

we're a conservative community and it was like he put it right up top.

I say this my late father and I was a school superintendent I'm well aware of

...