America’s Librarians Became Militantly Political

Churchill once said of John Foster Dulles that he was “the only case I know of a bull who carries his own China shop around with him.” Had Churchill miraculously lived another 60 odd years, I think he would agree that when it comes to this particular metaphor, Dulles has been outclassed. At the dawn of Trump’s second term, we even see that the bull has become self-aware and is deliberately trying to break as much of the federal crockery as he can get away with.

Last week, Trump issued an executive order proposing the shuttering of seven obscure federal agencies, notably including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Churlish former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went into high dudgeon, or in Reich’s case maybe just dudgeon, to let us know “Tyrants view educated citizens as their greatest enemy. Slaveholders stopped the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Dictators censor media. That’s why Trump is attacking education, science, museums, and the arts. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.”

Well, I guess you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I’m no fan of tyranny, slavery, Nazis, or book burning. I have written tens of thousands of words opposing government censorship, I have made a living reading and reviewing books, and I spent 17 years on the board of a private school. I hope it is apparent I care about knowledge and education. And speaking as an ostensibly educated, literate, patriotic American, I am asking the Trump administration to follow through and please, please, please in italics, stick it to America’s librarians.

To be clear, I’m also excited by the prospect of any number of museums being collateral damage, but the issue of political insanity in museums, particularly the art world, has already been well noted. Indeed, you know most museum officials have anti-American politics the same way you know that someone is vegan, into astrology, or didn’t vote for Trump – they’ll tell you. Five years ago, the director of the Met actually said to The New York Times “There is no doubt that the Met and its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy.’’ I had to read “its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as” a few times and got so turned around I didn’t know whether to object to the self-abasing radicalism or elocution lessons from Kamala Harris.

In contrast to the caricature of snobbish museum curators, librarians have been freeriding on a mostly positive cultural stereotype of old biddies who yell at kids to keep quiet but somehow also 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 hard to say whether there was an organized takeover of the profession or it organically attracted a new generation that saw their primary vocational responsibility as agents of radical and unwelcome social change. Regardless, they’ve become a threat to future generations and are making us dumber.

Solidarity!

In 2023 the American Library Association elected as its president a Marxist lesbian. And how do you know someone’s a Marxist lesbian? Well, they’ll tell you. “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary,” Emily Drabinski tweeted following her victory. “I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! And my mom is SO PROUD. I love you mom.”

Drabinski later deleted her tweet and feigned surprise many people were disturbed to learn a previously apolitical association 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 publication last year on how “defending libraries is fighting capitalism,” Drabinski proudly notes that “at least 54% of the 10,000-plus 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.” Somehow it was less concerning that an organization receiving public funds and run by an avowed socialist had already announced plans to launch a “campaign school” to get people that support the ALA’s decidedly political agenda to run for school and library 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.

But Drabinski’s tenure, which ended last year, and the ALA’s concurrent decision to get involved in elections weren’t flukes. 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 inclined to admit they have brazenly invited a political backlash for their bizarre conflation of making sensible judgments about not exposing children to perverse sexual material with actual censorship.

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. Now it has been normalized in much of the country, and perhaps no one is more responsible for the drag queen story hour phenomenon than local librarians. 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 convinced themselves that this has nothing to do with children and they are instead guarding the thin inky line between civilization and widespread anti-gay bigotry. This is patent nonsense, and everyone knows it. If some academic was giving a talk down at the local library branch on, say, the lifelong friendship of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood at a time in the 20th century when it was frowned upon for both writers to be openly homosexual, well, in the year of our Lord 2025 even the most conservative communities in America would likely do nothing more than grumble, assuming anyone noticed. We get it. You’re here, you’re queer, and we’re used to it.

Free Publicity

But this is not about local libraries providing resources for gay people in the community. This is once again, 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 has explicit sexual content, with the list being heavy on LGBT themes, and every book on the list is specifically aimed at kids.

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, if your kid is actually assigned This Book is Gay, Flamer, or Gender Queer it’s time to look into private school. 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 I have previously explained at length the moral degradation of so-called Young Adult Fiction, but since I’m once again diving into the deep end of the cesspool, via Wikipedia, here is the condensed plot summary for another book the ALA list is going to bat for, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins. According to School Library Journal this is appropriate for “grade 9 up”:

Eden’s parents find out about her relationship with Andrew, and assume that she is being controlled by the devil, and so 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 goes to live with Carl, an older man he met at a bar, and moves with him to Vegas 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 for money and means of survival until she finds a place that helps young people in similar situations. …

Seth becomes attracted to Jared, a man he meets in the gym, and they have sex. Carl reveals that he had paid Jared to act as bait, and kicks Seth out. 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. …

Lydia sets up Alex and Ginger in the stripping business, and that becomes how they get 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 on. 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.” Indeed, one online review of Tricks I stumbled across was a kid saying they were pleasantly surprised there weren’t too many words on the page.

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 your local library has several copies of Ellen Hopkins’ books in the kids’ section.

The Devil and Ms. Jones

Which brings me to the woman who is currently the most celebrated librarian in America, Amanda Jones. 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 tried to get a restraining order, but that 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 become a minor celebrity who has been given tongue baths 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 audience would hear a story about screwing up the courage to sue conservatives for saying mean things on Facebook and completely fail to see the contradiction in the larger 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 note that I first became aware of Jones when I saw her memoir very prominently displayed in a public library, which certainly speaks to the self-regard 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 wit:

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. Right then, the song “Hold On,” by Wilson Phillips, came on the radio. I perked up and wiped the tears from my face. The beginning of the song says, “No one can change your life except for you / Don’t ever let anyone step all over you.” … 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’s this rare combination of morally flexible and impressionable, I suppose we should be grateful the DJ didn’t get a wild hair that day 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.

If you’re old enough to remember the 80s and 90s, as I am, this is a fundamentally different debate. 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 in liberal areas for not being woke enough, e.g. a school in Washington state determined To Kill A Mockingbird “centers on whiteness and does not 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 one of the men she sued was objecting to when Jones made her stand 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. Sure, it’s outrageous that kids can find information on how to get on 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.

To the extent Jones does discuss the issues surrounding explicit content aimed at kids, 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. After a review, and not just taking one page they saw on the internet, the library determined that it would be appropriate to relocate the book in adult nonfiction. 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. Moving the work to the adult non-fiction collection will retain the work as available to patrons of the parish, maintaining the integrity of the system’s collection, while adjusting 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.

Just so we’re clear, the full title of the book here is Let’s Talk About It: THE TEEN’S GUIDE to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human. (I may have added some emphasis here, since Jones wants to downplay the relevance.) For what it’s worth, Let’s Talk About It made the ALA’s list, so it’s not hard to find at libraries, and yes, it really does tell a target audience of teenagers “depending on your age and where you found it, porn can also be unethical or illegal to watch. So do your research! Look up interviews with your fave porn performers, go to sites they recommend and pay for your porn.”

It’s hard to imagine existing in the same moral universe with people whose concerns about pornography are this limited. “Honey, I found smut all over Billy’s phone. I was worried at first, but he showed me this great interview with four-time AVN-award-winner Amanda Huginkiss who recommended the Pornhub monthly 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 and say something nice. 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 ultimate problem here is that she doesn’t seem to have a clue 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’s not happening. 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 to what extent public institutions should reflect community values, and true liberals should welcome participation in the democratic process to resolve them.

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. And no matter what they say, you’re not anti-gay or a bigot for thinking that kids should not be exposed to prurient things or that even simple good taste should be weighed when deciding what gets put 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.

Whether public institutions, even those as humble as your local library, are subject to democratic accountability instead of controlled by unelected bureaucrats, is ultimately what so much of the sturm and drang of Trump’s second term has been about. 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 know there are some very good librarians who are doing their best to be attuned and responsive to the values of their communities, and I hope they are appreciated. 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 arrogant to realize their personal politics do not get to obviate this obviously democratic debate about what books get chosen over others and what is in the best interests of children.

Because the moment we stop using democracy to decide these questions … well, wasn’t someone just banging on about handmaidens to tyranny?

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator