A large organization that drives the training of U.S. librarians and their use of public funds has chosen a self-described “Marxist lesbian” as its next president. On April 13, the members of The American Library Association (ALA), the largest library association in the world, elected Emily Drabinski as their new president.
How did Drabinski herself describe her win? As she tweeted:
“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. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity!”
The ALA’s approximately 54,000 members include librarians, libraries, library graduate schools, members of library boards and associations, and library students. The vast majority of its membership fees are provided by taxpayer funds.
On a personal web page, Drabinski touted multiple endorsements from labor and LGBT activists in her bid for the ALA presidency, including from Randi Weingarten, the far-Left president of the American Federation of Teachers. “I so value Emily’s work in intentionally bringing a class, labor, and queer consciousness to her efforts as an anti-racist ally,” wrote fellow ALA member April M. Hathcock.
Drabinski’s YouTube videos teach librarians how to “subvert”, meaning to inject hard-left politics and aberrant sexuality into their publicly funded work. One such lecture, given on July 6, 2021, was entitled “Teaching the Radical Catalog.” In the lecture, Drabinski discussed her homosexual coming out experience. At her first librarian job, “At Sarah Lawrence, absolutely everybody was queer. … There were so many ways to be gay. … And it was my job to teach those students how to find themselves in our library catalog,” she said. She described “queering the library” as “critical thinking.”
I frequently note how the Left has nearly completed its “long march through the institutions,” capturing them for the Left and using them to promote Leftism. The librarians are an excellent example of this process in action. The librarians lean Left.
According to Open Secrets, a group that tracks political contributions, donors with occupation “librarian” overwhelming contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 presidential election cycle. The Clinton campaign received $12,566 in donations, while Donald Trump only received $30—a ratio of 419 to 1.
I when I say the librarians “lean Left,” i don’t mean liberal, I mean hard-Left as in Marxist or communist.
The ALA was notoriously missing in action after a 1999 report documented and condemned the Cuban government’s crackdown on independent libraries and librarians with a “campaign of threats, intimidation, harassment, eviction, short-term arrests and the confiscation of incoming book donations or book collections.” The Cuban regime jailed dozens of independent librarians, confiscating and even burning entire collections of books. Library associations in Canada, Holland, Denmark, and Spain condemned the Cuban dictatorship. The American Library Association, however, did not.
Apparently, book-burning is just fine with the ALA if it is done by a communist government.
Sadly, this isn’t anything new. In the introduction to his carefully researched book on the response of American librarians to the emergence of the Soviet Union, “Not Seeing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1917-1960,” Stephen Karetzky notes that:
“For over seven decades, the leaders of the American library profession failed to understand, or oppose, the Soviet Union and its communist form of librarianship. This lack of . . . dedication to democratic ideals was remarkable. Prominent, well-educated librarians visited the USSR to inspect this new type of society: many of its basic elements were there for the seeing. These professionals also had easy access to accurate written critiques of the revolutionary regime. . . . Nevertheless, these librarians generally thought very highly of Soviet librarianship, often considering it superior to that in the United States, and did their best to assist it. Moreover, after the onset of the Cold War, they vigorously fought American anti-communism. Thus, in thought and deed, they betrayed the fundamental values, goals, and interests of their profession and their country.”
Librarians often claim that they are standing up to “book banners” or “book burners.” But in all but a few cases, the so-called “banned books” were not banned at all, but were merely challenged and have remained available. Most challenges involve parents complaining about books with sexual or violent content.
A quick look at the ten most challenged books of recent years indicates the vast majority are pitched to teenagers (generally for ages 12 to 18) and are mostly about LGBT issues, like 2016’s “Two Boys Kissing.” One book entitled “George” is targeted towards the elementary aged children and explores the issue of transgenderism. So parents complain about books pushing aberrant sexuality and sexual identity that are pitched at young people, and the librarians pretend they are righteously opposing “book banning.”
Librarians are strongly encouraged to “weed,” meaning to discard books with low checkout rates to free up limited shelf space. In practice, however, “weeding” means throwing out older books just because they are old, and since older books are far more likely to be conservative, Christian, pro-freedom, pro-American, and anti-communist than newer books, the process of “weeding” remorselessly marches a library’s collection to the Left.
And that leftward march continues even if the librarian is ideologically neutral. But “weeding” provides a convenient excuse for ideologically motivated librarians—which clearly is almost all of them—to toss out conservative books and retain Leftist tomes. I’ll give you a recent example that I ran across.
I am a hopeless bibliophile and book collector, with a printed book collection numbering in the thousands (and a similarly large e-book collection). Several of my local libraries have been “weeding” with seemingly increasing regularity, and I often visit just to see what is being discarded, either for free or for a nominal price like one dollar. My reaction to the discarded books is often, “why are they throwing this out? It is a perfectly good book, just a little older.”
I was recently at a local library and saw a children’s book on Thomas Sowell. It is about 40 pages, and lavishly illustrated, and should be interesting to children. It was being offered for sale for one dollar, and since Thomas Sowell has always been one of my intellectual heroes (I’ve been reading his books for over 35 years), I bought it.
The book was brand new, obviously not more than a few months old, and yet was being discarded. Why? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was being discarded because it was celebrating the life of a conservative icon.
The book, being directed at children, did not delve into Sowell’s economic or political philosophy. It was about how he pulled himself up from humble beginnings—his father died before he was born, he was black and was born in 1930 North Carolina, and grew up in a shack with no electricity or hot water—and eventually earned degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago and wrote 30 books, all without accepting any handouts or short-cuts, nor any affirmative action hires or positions.
I noticed that there was a website on the back cover: heroesofliberty.com, and that the book was one of a brand new series of children’s books published by a new company. I also noticed that the website had a button for people to donate money for books to be sent to libraries, so in all likelihood someone donated at least $25.00 for that book to be sent to my local library, so they could toss it for a $1.00.
In summary, we’re facing a very steep uphill climb to reclaim our culture from the communists. One good place to start is to provide a home for perfectly good “weeded” books, and thus keep civilization alive, if only in your own home. Another is to support the emerging anti-communist counter-culture, including new conservative publishers like heroesofliberty.com. (In the video below, it is revealed that Facebook will not allow heroes of liberty to market their children’s books on Facebook):