With the election of a self-declared “lesbian Marxist” to be its new president, the American Library Association (ALA) gave away the game. Now, only the naïve can think of the ALA’s upcoming “Banned Books Week” as a celebration of free speech. The observant — and the complicit — know it to be something else, namely one more goose step in the ALA’s long march through the institutions.
The event, which kicks off on October 1, comes at an ironic time. Earlier this month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit smacked down the Biden White House for its unprecedent effort to censor its ideological foes. Said the three-judge panel in summation: “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.” (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Cancel Culture Trickles Down: An Up-Close Look)
The ALA and its 50,000 members pretended not to notice the oppressiveness of the regime or its effect on their patrons. This took some effort. “On multiple occasions,” wrote the judges, “[White House] officials coerced the platforms into direct action via urgent, uncompromising demands to moderate content.” The court was not breaking news. The effort made by Biden and his allies to shut down their ideological opponents was widely known even before the election of 2020.
For the ALA, given the threat the family represents to its ambitions, silencing parents makes perfect sense.
For professional reasons alone, the librarians should have said something. According to Pew Research, 29 percent of library-going Americans visit a library to use its computers. As Pew notes, “Library users who take advantage of libraries’ computers and internet connections are more likely to be young, black, female, and lower income.”
For the last three years, if not longer, government censors have been denying library patrons — the less affluent in particular — access to information that might well have affected their votes, their health, and their very freedom.
The ALA has said nothing for one simple reason: it identifies its interests with those of the Biden White House. Like so many such associations, the nearly 150-year-old organization has been veering quietly leftward for decades. This past year, however, the ALA lurched hard enough left to put red state America on notice. (READ MORE: The Semantic Burden of Speaking While White)
Texas took exception to the ascent of the aforementioned “lesbian Marxist,” Emily Drabinski. A proud and mouthy member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Drabinski caught people’s attention with her much too honest post-election tweet, “collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world.” Not inclined to help a Marxist-led outfit fundamentally transform America, Texas cut ties with the ALA.
Meanwhile Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s comically named “Office for Intellectual Freedom,” exposed her own oppressive urges on a Zoom call. As reported in The Washington Post, Caldwell-Stone specifically detailed “how libraries could reject story hours held by BRAVE Books, a Christian, conservative publisher of faith-based children’s books.”
From the ALA’s perspective, the Founding Fathers would seem to have drafted the First Amendment to protect a schoolkid’s access to porn.
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft noticed. Shocked by the organization’s efforts to sideline a Christian book company, he cut the state’s support to the ALA. Said Ashcroft, “[My] office cannot continue to support an organization that does not protect the First Amendment rights of Missourians and refuses to follow its own governing documents.”
As I noted in these pages earlier this month, the ALA’s selective embrace of free speech trickles down. I had been invited by an open-minded clerk to speak at the Darwin Barker Library in Fredonia, New York about my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Flight from America’s Cities. Soon after the notice went out, the library board elected to “disinvite” me.
As is often the case, the censors on the left mask their fascist instincts with liberal bromides. “We believe that the diversity of perspectives is crucial in creating a rich and informative dialogue at our library events,” the library director emailed me. That said, the library board found my “views and opinions” unsuitable for its “diverse audience.”
Small town librarians may be deceiving themselves, but the ALA consciously uses Banned Books Week to deceive the public. The talk of “intellectual freedom” and “diversity of perspectives” lulls the useful idiots who support this week-long indulgence into thinking they are doing something more noble than subverting parental rights. (READ MORE: The Reparations Success Story That Isn’t)
From the ALA’s perspective, the Founding Fathers would seem to have drafted the First Amendment to protect a schoolkid’s access to porn. Of the ALA’s “Top 13” most “challenged” books, all are for children or young adults, all are thought to be “sexually explicit,” and seven focus on LGBTQIA+ issues, including six of the top seven.
Number two on the list is All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson — only Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer racked up more challenges this past year. Although Johnson’s title may not be as provocative as Kobabe’s, his language certainly is.
Louisiana’s crazy-like-a-fox senator, John Kennedy, made even the woke cringe when he read excerpts from both books on the Senate floor, starting with Johnson’s. “I put some lube on and got him on his knees,” read Kennedy at his languorous southern best. “And I began to slide into him from behind. I pulled out of him and kissed him while he masturbated.”
To the discomfort of friend and foe alike Kennedy didn’t stop there. Given his status as U.S. Senator, no one dared eject him. Parents enjoy no such immunity. Earlier this year in Lee’s Summit Missouri, the school board president had a father escorted out of the building for daring to read from the same book. Said the father, Chuck Quesenberry, “I can’t read to this group of adults what a 14-year-old can check out in your libraries? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
For the ALA, given the threat the family represents to its ambitions, silencing parents makes perfect sense. Last week, a senior teen librarian at Kansas City Public Library showed how ritual humiliation works in an increasingly Maoist America. During a presentation on banned books to an assembled group of high schoolers, the librarian asked the students what kind of people they thought would want to ban books. (READ MORE: Michelle Obama’s ‘Black Flight’ Problem)
“People who can’t let other people have opinions,” said one student. Replied the smirking librarian, fully indifferent to the historic free speech abuse by her president, “Yes. We call them ‘parents.’”
Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Flight from America’s Cities. is available in all formats.
