Hearing the news that “Walk Two Moons” had been dropped from the curriculum in Williamson County, the children’s novelist Katherine Applegate emailed Parnassus Books and ordered 100 copies for the staff to give away at their discretion. Later that day, her husband, the young-adult novelist Michael Grant, heard the news about “Maus” and contacted the store with the same instructions and a 100-copy order of his own. “With the dark clouds of book banning looming, they brightened all our day,” store manager Andy Brennan told me in an email.As Whitney Kimball Coe, director of National Programs at the Center for Rural Strategies, pointed out in The Daily Yonder, many people in McMinn County itself are outraged by their school board’s decision, and are trying to counter it with library donations and community discussions about antisemitism and even plans to run for the school board. And, as Ms. Coe points out, national news stories that paint all rural Tennesseans as illiterate antisemites don’t help those efforts.“If you must write about us, at least give a damn about us,” she writes. “Outrage is the quick and easy response if you’re not committed to the sum of us; that is, if you’re only committed to signaling which side you’re on and don’t really care about communities outside your bubble.”Still, it is possible to trust that the parents in McMinn County are acting in what they believe is the best interest of their children, and also to recognize that these parents are being manipulated by toxic and dangerous political forces operating at the state and national levels. Here in Tennessee, book bans are just a small but highly visible part of a much larger effort to privatize public schools and turn them into conservative propaganda centers. This crusade is playing out in ways that transcend local school board decisions, and in fact are designed to wrest control away from them altogether.I don’t mean simply the law, passed last year, that limits how racism is taught in public schools across the state. I’m talking about an array of bills being debated in the Tennessee General Assembly right now. One would purge books considered “obscene or harmful to minors” from school libraries across the state. Another would ban teaching materials that “promote, normalize, support or address lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) issues or lifestyles.” Yet another would prevent school districts from receiving state funding for undocumented students.Most of all I’m talking about Gov. Bill Lee’s announcement, in his State of the State address last week, that he has approached Hillsdale College, a Christian institution in Michigan, to open 50 charter schools in Tennessee — Mr. Lee reportedly requested 100 — that would follow a curriculum designed to make kids “informed patriots.” Not informed citizens; informed patriots, as conservative Christians define that polarizing term.“What strikes me as the unusual takeaway is that the governor is intentionally wheeling the state into this very ideologically loaded and electorally loaded civics education,” said Adam Laats, the author of “Fundamentalist U: Keeping the American Faith in Higher Education,” in an interview with The Tennessean.