John Foster Dulles was once referred to as” the only bull who carries his own China shop around with him,” according to Chirchill. Had Churchill unexpectedly lived another 60 odd years, I think he did believe that when it comes to this particular analogy, Dulles has been outclassed. We also witness the bull’s self-awareness at the start of Trump’s subsequent term and his deliberate effort to disintegrate as much of the federal racket as he can.
Last month, Trump issued an executive get proposing the closing of seven mysterious governmental agencies, somewhat including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Ungracious former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went into great jinks, or in Reich’s case sometimes only dudgeon, to let us understand” Tyrants view educated people as their greatest enemy. Slaves prevented the enslaved from studying literature. Germans burned books. Rulers censor the internet. That’s why Trump is attacking learning, knowledge, museums, and the arts. Knowledge is the governess of tyranny”.
I suppose you’re only going to have to have faith in me if I tell you that I don’t like tyranny, slavery, Germans, or book using. I have written tens of thousands of thoughts opposing government censorship, I have made a living checking and reviewing books, and I spent 17 times on the board of a private school. I hope it becomes obvious that I care about education and information. And speaking as an apparently educated, intelligent, patriotic American, I am asking the Trump presidency to following through and kindly, please, kindly in bold, keep it to America’s library.
To be clear, I’m even excited by the prospect of any number of museums being money injury, but the issue of social insanity in museums, especially the art world, has already been well noted. You’re aware of this fact, but most museum officers will tell you that they have anti-American politics the same way they know if someone is vegan, astrological, or didn’t vote for Trump. Five years ago, the chairman of the Met truly said to The New York Times” There is no doubt that the Met and its growth is also connected with a reasoning of what is defined as white power.’ Its development is also connected to a logic of what is meant by” a few times and got so turned around I didn’t know whether to disagree with Kamala Harris ‘ self-abasing extremism or diction classes.”
In contrast to the caricature of pretentious museum curators, librarians have been freeriding on a largely positive social stereotype of older biddies who yell at kids to keep silent but somehow even know how to help you find obscure information on local zoning laws if it comes to that.
The reality is that sometime in the last few decades the vocation of local librarian acquired a uniquely left-wing nimbus. It’s unclear whether there was a planned takeover of the profession or whether it was a natural evolution of a new generation who saw their primary job role as agents of radical and unwelcome social change. Regardless, they’ve become a threat to future generations and are making us dumber.
Solidarity!
The American Library Association elected a Marxist lesbian as its president in 2023. And how do you know someone’s a Marxist lesbian? Well, they’ll tell you”. I find it hard to believe that Emily Drabinski, the president-elect of @ALALibrary, believes that collective power can be created and used to create a better world. I am so excited for what we will do together. Disclosing! And my mom is SO PROUD. I love you mom.”
After Drabinski deleted her tweet, she feigned surprise as many people discovered that a previously apolitical organization had been radicalized. However, Drabinski never hid her desire to exploit the ALA’s influence to further her left-wing politics. In an article for a socialist magazine last year about how “defending libraries is fighting capitalism,”” Drabinski proudly points out that” at least 54 % of the librarians who voted were at least socialist-curious enough to elect me.
Alabama, Wyoming, Missouri, Texas, and Florida eventually cut ties with the ALA in response to the organization’s extremism. Initially, free speech groups such as Pen America decried the fact the states withdrawing ALA support were allegedly proposing” some kind of litmus test for the politics of all organizations that receive state funding, the likes of which haven’t really been adopted before in the United States. It was less concerning that a foundation that was receiving government funding and run by a vengeful socialist had already announced plans to launch a” campaign school” to encourage candidates who supported the ALA’s decidedly political agenda to run for libraries and school boards. The ALA also lobbies to” preserve and enhance the , Institute of Museum and Library Services,” and the organization’s hard-left turn surely undermined their credibility and made it easier for a Republican president to pull the plug.
However, Drabinski’s tenure ended last year and the ALA made the same decision to participate in elections as a result. They were a culmination. No doubt the ALA would insist growing calls for censorship have forced them to get involved in politics. They are less likely to acknowledge that their bizarre conflation of making wise decisions about not exposing children to perverse sexual material with actual censorship has blatantly provoked a political backlash.
For most of my life, the idea that a man would tape his junk backwards and dress up like a particularly garish grande horizontale with the specific goal of reading to a group of assembled children would have been an invitation to violence. No one is more responsible for the drag queen story hour phenomenon than local librarians, which has now become more common in much of the nation. Why thousands of jumped-up book baristas are now willing to be suicide bombers in the culture war is beyond me, except to say that radical left-wing identity politics views espousing whatever form of self-expression is presently causing the most social harm as necessary progress. And there were only so many taboos you can ablate before arriving at those designed to protect children.
Naturally, librarians have come to the conclusion that this is not a matter of children and that they are rather guarding the thin, blurry line between modernity and widespread anti-gay bigotry. This is patent nonsense, and everyone knows it. Even the most conservative communities in America would likely only grumble if an academic was giving a talk about, say, the lifelong friendship of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood at a time when it was forbidden for both writers to be openly gay at the local library branch, assuming anyone had noticed. We get it. You’re here, you’re queer, and we’re used to it.
Free media
But this is not about local libraries providing resources for gay people in the community. Again, it’s about kids. If ordinary people know anything at all about the ALA, it’s because of their annual list of the” Top 10 Most Challenged Books” and the corresponding celebration of” banned books week. ” ( Of course, when you get down to brass tacks, even the ALA concedes there’s no actual book banning in America– which is why they make a list of” challenged, “rather than banned books. ) Every book on the list contains explicit sexual content, and every book on the list is written specifically for children.
Only one book on the most recent list – Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye– has any universally agreed upon literary merit and is also the only book your child might be conceivably assigned to read in an actual class. Suffice to say, it’s time to look into private school if your child is actually assigned This Book is Gay, Flamer, or Gender Queer. Even the author of Gender Queer, a graphic novel ( in both senses of the word ) that features drawings of underage oral sex, has said”, I don’t recommend this book for kids! ” Yet, it keeps topping the ALA’s annual list because somebody keeps ordering it for school libraries.
Now that I’ve previously covered the moral decay of so-called Young Adult Fiction in greater detail, I’ve decided to do so. Here’s the condensed plot summary for another book the ALA list is going to bat for, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins, since I’m once again diving into the deep end of the cesspool, via Wikipedia. According to School Library Journal this is appropriate for” grade 9 up”:
When Eden’s parents learn about her relationship with Andrew and assume she is being run over by the devil, she is sent to Tears of Zion. There, she is kept in captivity and forced to do work that would supposedly rid her of evil. She starts giving a worker named Jerome sex in exchange for food, shampoo, and other treats. ……
Seth’s dad finds out he is gay, so he kicks him out of the house. He moves with Carl, an older man he met at a bar, and moves there as his companion. ……
Ginger is raped again by one of her mother’s boyfriends, and she finds out that Iris is charging them to have sex with her. ……
]Eden ] gets rides from truck drivers to Vegas. She uses sex to earn money and find a place to assist young people in similar circumstances until she finds a place to do so. ……
Seth becomes attracted to Jared, a man he meets in the gym, and they have sex. Seth is kicked out when Carl reveals that he paid Jared to play the bait. Seth goes online and looks for a new man to stay with. ……
He cheats on Whitney, forces her to record their sex and have sex with other people, and gets her addicted to drugs. ……
Alex and Ginger are set up in the stripping business by Lydia, and that is where they get their money and a place to stay. … They get arrested because they were discovered by Vegas Vice … Ginger calls Gram and finds out that Iris is dying from an STD. ……
Cody gets into business with Lydia, partnering up with Misty occasionally in having sex with men. He does not believe himself to be gay, but he is described as feeling that he has to do anything to get money and support the rest of his family.
And so forth. Incredibly, this trash is written in comically clichéd subliterate verse, it’s an Iliad for idiots-in-training who will earnestly believe a big problem facing kids in the age of the smartphone is religious oppression at home:” we go to public school/ ( Mama’s too lazy to homeschool ) and come/ face-to-face with the unsaved every day. In fact, a young person said they were surprised to find there weren’t too many words on the page when they read one online review of Tricks.
Having actually looked at it, I would keep Tricks away from children to preserve a semblance of good taste and intellect, setting aside the morals on display. And the fact that the ALA would give a book such as this so much free publicity is a pretty good demonstration that when librarians lost the ability to tell right from wrong, along with it went the ability to discern literature from slop. Which is why it’s more than likely that the children’s section of your neighborhood library has several copies of Ellen Hopkins ‘ books.
The Devil and Ms. Jones
Which brings me to Amanda Jones, the woman who is currently the most well-known librarian in the world. Ms. Jones acquired some minor celebrity a few years ago when, in her capacity as president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, she received blowback for passionately defending books members of the Livingston Parish community were objecting to at a local library board meeting in Louisiana. She ended up suing some online critics after they accused her of, among other things”, fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section. She first attempted to obtain a restraining order, but it was laughed out of court. Then she sued for defamation and the  , case was dismissed in 2022, but as of last December, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled it was back on.
In the years since her lawsuit, she has been labeled a minor celebrity by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, People, the Washington Post, Education Week, USA Today, American Libraries magazine, NPR, and every other outlet where the public would hear a story about how conservatives have cheated on Facebook. She also completely ignores the wider debate about censorship. She’s won the American Library Association’s Paul Howard Award for Courage, natch. And she’s the author of a memoir, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning In America. ( I should point out that I first became aware of Jones after seeing her memoir very prominently displayed in a public library, which undoubtedly speaks to the self-esteem of America’s librarians. )
Anyway, I think I’m not holding back where I’m coming from, so you can take or leave my judgment that it is not a good book, and it did not make me more sympathetic to her motivations. To illustrate:
I started to pray, and I decided to finally turn it over to God. Quietly crying as I drove, I asked for a sign to be given to help guide me. Wilson Phillips ‘ song” Hold On,” which was playing at the time, was playing on the radio. I perked up and wiped the tears from my face. No one can alter a person’s life save for you, according to the song’s introduction. ” … Some people might scoff, but I got chills in that moment and just knew I should be paying attention.
Yes, some people will scoff, particularly those of us who don’t have a faith so divorced from basic ethical, let alone Biblical, principle that Wilson Phillips is a sufficiently supernatural reason to continue fighting to waste public resources on books about transgenderism aimed at five-year-olds. If she can be this extraordinary morally shrewd and impressionable, we should be thankful that the DJ didn’t have to go wild and play” Helter Skelter.”
Indeed, one thing that is characteristic of nearly all the censorship debates in recent years is the obvious unwillingness to discuss the specific nature of the work being questioned because it is almost always explicitly, graphically sexual, and devoid of defensible artistic context.
This is a fundamentally different debate if you’re old enough to recall the 1980s and 1990s, as I am. Back then, the books challenged in schools were actual works of literature liberals of the time were eager to defend. They had no problems publicly discussing the content of Slaughterhouse-Five, The Catcher In The Rye, and Huckleberry Finn and earnestly trying to educate those they deemed ignorant of their thematic and literary value. ( Curiously, in recent years, the classics are almost more likely to be challenged for being too awake; for instance, a Washington state school determined that To Kill a Mockingbird centers on whiteness and doesn’t adequately represent an authentic Black point of view. )
That’s not at all what’s happening now. Nowhere in That Librarian does Jones mention This Book Is Gay, which is the book that one of the men sued was criticizing when she addressed the board of directors at the library board meeting. I suspect that is for a reason”. The bestselling young adult non-fiction book on sexuality and gender “is essentially a how-to manual for gay sex and beyond, discussing everything from kinks such as eating excrement to telling kids how gay hook-up apps on their phone work. Yes, it’s outrageous that kids can find out how to use Grindr in the “young adult” section. But if you go to a community meeting and say it’s irresponsible to give children information that will enable them to be exploited by adult predators, be advised smug librarians seem to have no trouble getting lawyers to work pro bono.
In spite of the fact that Jones does raise concerns about explicit content directed at children, her conclusions are embarrassingly self-defeating:
Let’s Talk About It was listed in the library system as being recommended for ages fourteen and up, and it was shelved in teen nonfiction. The book covers the topic of relationships, safe sex, friendships, gender, sexuality, and anatomy in graphic novel form. The library decided that it would be appropriate to relocate the book in adult nonfiction after conducting a review and not simply taking one page they saw online. The committee wrote”, The author’s suggestions that teens view pornography online, seek out kinks, and take nude photographs of themselves goes beyond sex education. The adult non-fiction collection will continue to hold the work as available to parishioners, keeping the system’s collection intact, and changing the age threshold. ” The book was not removed from the collection but moved within the collection so that readers of a certain age would still have access to the title. I agreed with the librarians again and trusted their judgment of what was best for our library after they completed a comprehensive review.
Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human is the full title of the book here, just so we’re clear. ( I may have added some emphasis here, since Jones wants to downplay the relevance. ) According to what it’s worth, Let’s Talk About It made the list of ALA members, which is good because it’s accessible in libraries, and because it” truly does tell a target audience of teenagers” depending on your age and location, watching porn can be unethical or prohibited. So do your research! Look up interviews with your fave porn performers, go to sites they recommend and pay for your porn.”
It’s difficult to imagine people with such limited concerns about pornography ever coexist in the same moral universe. Honey, I found smut all over Billy’s phone. I initially was concerned, but he showed me this incredible interview with Amanda Huginkiss, a four-time AVN award winner, who had a recommendation for the monthly Pornhub plan. Costs less than a Netflix sub, he’s going to mow the neighbor’s lawn to pay for it this weekend.”
As for Jones, she walked right up to the precipice of acknowledging there’s a huge problem of people marketing explicit content to children, noted these books are full of life-alteringly terrible sex advice, conceded even good liberals are unwilling to defend it, and then acted like putting a book she herself deems unfit for kids, but still says” THE TEEN’S GUIDE TO SEX “on the spine, on a different shelf in the same library was a magnanimous compromise to” maintain the integrity” of the collection.
The Democratic Process
Obviously you know what I think of Jones, but she has endured a fair bit of straight vitriol and doxxing, which I absolutely do not condone. So, let me try to be polite and reciprocate. In her defamation suit, all she’s asking for is$ 1 and an apology, and I genuinely respect that she’s made this a matter of principle and not punishment.  ,
The biggest issue with this is that she doesn’t seem to know what principle is actually at stake. The subtitle of Jones ‘ book is” The Fight Against Book Banning In America,” and I do wonder if by her own logic, her opponents could sue her for defamation for implying they are banning books. That is not taking place. You can get This Book Is Gay at Barnes and Noble. Challenging the specific use of finite tax dollars to purchase highly controversial and deliberately provocative books for public libraries is a totally separate issue from book banning, as well as a perfectly legitimate issue for local governance. There will always be questions about how much public institutions should reflect community values, and true liberals should welcome their participation in the democratic process to address these issues.
Unfortunately for America’s militant librarians, there aren’t many communities in America that share the values in This Book Is Gay, Let’s Talk About It, or Tricks. No matter what they say, you’re not anti-gay or a bigot for believing that kids shouldn’t be exposed to vile things or that even simple good taste should be taken into account when deciding what goes on shelves. You get a say in what happens at the local library, regardless of whether the librarian thinks you’re Bible-thumping, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragger. In the case of Amanda Jones, an obviously liberal librarian in Livingston parish that voted 85 percent for Trump, you can see where she would prefer to make the debate over library books a matter of principle that she at least attempts to define, rather than bowing to democracy.
In the end, the sturm and drang of Trump’s second term has been about whether public institutions, even those as modest as your neighborhood library, are accountable to democratic accountability rather than being overruled by elected bureaucrats. And whether the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, along with the millions in federal grants it hands out, will increase accountability remains to be seen, but making local libraries more dependent, and therefore responsive, to local control seems like a step in the right direction – especially as a response to organizations such as the ALA overstepping into electioneering.
I’m sure there are some excellent librarians out there who are working hard to stay informed and responsive to the values of their communities, and I sincerely appreciate them. But many other librarians, along with their various professional associations, are trying to make themselves into some sort of clerisy with unquestioned authority to use the libraries we pay for to dictate their values to the rest of the community. But no one who is truly passionate about books and ideas would defend libraries as some untouchable and abstract symbol of knowledge, rather than embrace good faith discussions about the fact ideas have consequences and the specific role libraries play in facilitating knowledge, which is mostly, but not always, a good thing. Peacocking librarians who are too haughty to acknowledge that their personal politics do not have the same voice as those who choose books over others and what serves children’s best interests.
Because the moment we stop using democracy to decide these questions … well, wasn’t someone just banging on about handmaidens to tyranny?
