In the summer of 2020, on the heels of George Floyd’s murder, the American Library Association (ALA) encouraged its members to support Black Lives Matter (BLM).
“Many people are feeling helpless, but there are many ways we can center the voices and experiences of Black library workers and the Black community, support the broader Black Lives Matter movement, fight against police violence, and further the cause of racial justice,” Amber Hayes, a communications officer for the ALA wrote in a mass email to the ALA and its affiliate, the Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services (ABOS).
Ron Kelley, an ALA member and traveling librarian, interpreted the email as a partisan call to action and cautioned his fellow members against corrupting the ostensibly apolitical organization by taking sides in a heated culture war.
“The propagandistic posting below about the Black Lives Matter organization is extremely unwise,” Kelley responded in an email to the ALA listserv, warning his colleagues that partisan messaging would turn the listserv into a “battlefield.”
After asking why the ALA wasn’t similarly up in arms about the profession’s groaning gender gap — “82 percent of American librarians are women” — he went on to suggest “Alternative Black Voices” worthy of consideration, including Jason Riley, Larry Elder, and Candace Owens.
“I remind you that, amidst the current — literally riotous — hysteria and our collective memory lapse, this used to be the purpose of a library. Keep politics out of the workplace. Please go riot on your own time,” he implored.
Kelley also asked, “Will discussion group kick out (censor) individuals who advocate for a non-political forum?”
His words were prophetic.
Some librarians on the server were offended and filed complaints with Kelley’s boss.
Mike Schull, a librarian in Indiana, sent an email to Kelley’s library accusing him of relying on “dubious sources,” and claimed the call to support BLM was “not a political statement but a moral one.”
Cathy Zimmerman, the executive director of ABOS, also complained to Kelley’s superiors, according to a blog post he wrote about the incident.
Kelley was fired shortly after.
Zimmerman declined to comment.
ALA Embraces ‘Critical Librarianship’
The stout septuagenarian is no right-wing culture warrior: Before he was fired, he worked as a mobile librarian based out of Flagstaff, Ariz., cruising around the state in a retrofitted school bus stacked with books and DVDs. His route included the Grand Canyon area and even “a Navajo ‘bead stop’ along Highway 89, and small towns within and without the Navajo Nation.”
Before turning to books, Kelley spent his early life traveling the world writing about Bedouins in Israel, Kurdish refugees, and Native Americans.
Under normal conditions, Kelley’s philosophy and biography would make him an exemplary librarian. He’s passionately open to all perspectives and guided by the basic principle that a librarian’s role doesn’t come with an invitation to curate viewpoints. However, with the ALA’s embrace of radical race and gender politics, folks like Kelley have become an endangered species.
Kelley had been caught in a cultural tsunami that made landfall in 2020, starting with the pandemic and accelerating with the summer racial protests that gripped the nation. The Trump Years, BLM, January 6, and Covid-19 triggered a radical transformation within the ALA. In January 2021, ALA members passed a motion arguing that “libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality.”
In other words, people like Kelley, who’d argued against taking political positions on controversial issues, were standing in the way of moral progress.
The ALA made its embrace of progressivism official in July 2021, updating its code of conduct to include a commitment to “recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases; to confront inequity and oppression; to enhance diversity and inclusion; and to advance racial and social justice.”
As far back as the ’60s, the ALA has taken the occasional stand on current events from Vietnam to environmentalism, librarianship scholar Michael Dudley told NR. Initially, there was pushback within the field by scholars such as David Bernhausen, who wrote an influential article in 1972 arguing that embracing politics would undermine the librarian’s role in society. The article ignited a firestorm, pitting supporters of political advocacy against librarians defending neutrality.
Throughout the coming decades, however, supporters of apolitical libraries lost ground with the rise of the Critical Librarianship movement that has since become mainstream.
“I’m concerned,” Dudley told NR. “The critical librarianship literature is advocating intervening not only in society, but in people’s minds. Like trying to change people’s own beliefs.”
“I find it problematic. You know, asking library workers to confront inequity and oppression everywhere? Where are the boundaries?” Dudley asked.
A review of the literature shows that proponents of critical librarianship see themselves as explicitly political actors, participants in the battle for young minds.
“The time is urgent for critically informed action by all of us, by librarians. That action requires building power. The task I see as most clearly at hand for critical librarians is to locate our power in our structural positions and in each other, and to organize that power, collectively, toward shared ends,” Emily Drabinski, then a leading librarianship scholar, wrote in 2019.
Three years later, Drabinski became ALA’s president and steered the body toward its current embrace of everything political (predictably, in early January, the ALA demanded a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas).
The group’s shift has become more pronounced during Drabinski’s tenure. “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,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet following her selection. “I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity!”
Her comments inspired several states to reevaluate their relationship with the ALA. Montana, Idaho, and Texas eventually severed ties altogether. The ALA tried to downplay the growing pushback, underscoring its “non-partisan” nature following the former’s departure, but it was simply window dressing. Within two months, Drabinksi showed how hollow such comments were when she attended a socialist conference in Chicago and insisted libraries should be spaces for “socialist organizing.”
“I think your point that public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing, I think libraries really do too,” she told the audience after being introduced as “comrade.” “We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing,” Drabinkski said in audio statements captured by an undercover investigative journalist.
A Louisiana librarian of three decades, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, told NR that the idea of neutrality or objectivity in the profession has become obsolete.
“It’s totally gone. I felt like it was really going south in 2016,” she said, though “it’s just getting worse as time passes.”
“You can’t question climate change. You can’t question BLM. You can’t question gender transition,” she continued. “Abortion is another one we don’t have books [on] and we can’t discuss.”
Ban the Right Books
Bookstores across the American West began laying out their ALA-approved “Banned Books” displays a few weeks ahead of the official launch in early October.
In a Phoenix suburb, one local chain greeted visitors with a spotlight of challenged titles, including The Hate U Give, The Origin of Species, How to Be an Antiracist, and Gender Queer. The Handmaid’s Tale was conspicuously set in front of 1984, obscuring the latter’s cover altogether.
“READ MORE BANNED BOOKS!” was scrawled across open hardcovers in large black letters set against the backdrop of redacted passages.
The majority of the books touched upon the sacred cows of American progressivism: systemic racism, the scourge of religion, patriarchy, and transphobia.
Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules to Life, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn weren’t found anywhere. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series — first attacked by conservative Christians in the early 2000s and now a boogeyman of the left for the author’s comments supporting women’s-only spaces — was not included on the list.
Harry Potter peppered the ALA’s archive of most challenged books over the last two decades — when Christians complained about the series’ allegedly malign influence on children — but has been conspicuously absent since 2019, when Rowling first spoke up in defense of women. Meanwhile, Shrier and Peterson’s books have never made the list while Twain hasn’t made the Top 10 since 2007.
A Free Press investigation recently found many conservative books — and even those written by non-conservative writers simply dissenting from progressive orthodoxy — often never make it onto school library shelves in the first place. Among the nearly three dozen catalogs across “the largest public school districts in eight red and six blue states” — representing nearly 5,000 schools — candidate books by Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Tim Scott, and Ron DeSantis are not stocked at all.
The same disparity was found among public intellectuals. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi were in over 70 percent of districts. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo were all carried in more than half of the schools reviewed.
By comparison, Philip Magness’s The 1619 Project: A Critique, Thomas Sowell’s Social Justice Fallacies, Douglas Murray’s War on the West, Victor Davis Hanson’s The Case for Trump, and The Diversity Delusion by Heather Mac Donald were carried in none. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom led the pack, clocking in at a measly 8 percent.
By contrast, Kendi, a leading exponent of critical-race theory, has become somewhat of a rockstar within the ALA. When former president Barack Obama issued a rare public message condemning calls to ban books, he linked to the ALA initiative, which hosted the antiracist scholar days earlier under the banner, “Free People Read Freely.”
Kendi, who controversially argued the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” made even more reprehensible remarks during his college days. “Europeans are simply a different breed of human. They are socialized to be aggressive people,” he wrote as a senior. “Whites have tried to level the playing field with the AIDS virus and cloning, but they know these deterrents will only get them so far. This is where the murder, psychological brainwashing and deception comes into play.”
Still, the author is touted by the ALA and invited to headline public reading events. By comparison, Laura Bush, President George W. Bush’s wife — a former librarian who runs a library foundation — last spoke to the group in 2006.
“The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization. While we respect the rights of individuals to exercise their freedom of thought and expression, ALA does not align with, endorse, or promote the political beliefs, values, or ideologies of any one individual — including its elected leaders and members,” the ALA said in a statement. “ALA is guided by a single mission: ‘to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.’”
Apart from the shadowbanning of books, reporting in 2023 unearthed the growing phenomenon of progressive publishers bowdlerizing classic books.
Last year, physical descriptions of characters in Roald Dahl’s books were airbrushed by “sensitivity readers.” R. L. Stine’s classic Goosebumps anthology was similarly overhauled to incorporate inclusive language without the author’s permission. A character once described as “plump” was refashioned as “cheerful,” while references to the word “crazy” were changed to “silly.” Similar stealth edits were made in reissues of the James Bond book series, mostly written by Ian Fleming in the post-World War II era.
The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
While the ALA makes much of nefarious right-wing efforts to “ban” books, the unsuspecting consumer of ALA literature would have no idea that progressives are narrowing the range of acceptable literature.
ALA posters decorating book stores showcase so-called “book challenges” documented by the Office of Intellectual Freedom. Charts featuring the number of annual book challenges show a flat line from 2003 to 2020. With the onset of the pandemic, however, these challenges reportedly spiked tenfold. Today, almost every book on the ALA’s “most challenged” list touches on either LGBT or African-American topics.
Not a single book that rocked the progressive boat made the cut.
The posters allude to a censorious push by “political and religious groups,” but the ALA’s website elaborates precisely who these people really are. “Books are not the sole target of attacks orchestrated by conservative parent groups and right-wing media. Both school and public librarians are increasingly in the crosshairs of conservative groups during book challenges,” the website explains.
The words “liberal,” “progressive,” or “left-wing” cannot be found anywhere on the page.
In another post, the ALA writes about a schism between the pre- and post-pandemic world, where the “vast majority of challenges to library books and resources were brought by a single parent.” Today, there is mounting “evidence of a growing, well-organized, conservative political movement, the goals of which include removing books about race, history, gender identity, sexuality, and reproductive health from America’s public and school libraries that do not meet their approval.”
At least the ALA is transparent about its thesis.
The same argument is laundered, less explicitly, by allied groups such as Amnesty International USA and PEN America (often citing one another), that conservatives are on a book-banning crusade. Notably, a recent Heritage Foundation study showed nearly three-quarters of “banned books” identified by the latter were “actually listed as available,” and, in many cases, “copies of those books are currently checked out and in use by students.”
The Louisiana librarian agreed. “They use that against conservatives. They’ll say it was the conservatives banning The Handmaid’s Tale or whatever. It’s such a joke. All of those books are in the library,” she asserted. “We have all those books. Nobody’s not allowed to read them.”
The veteran librarian had opposed Louisiana’s vaccine mandate and got a doctor’s note exempting her given underlying medical conditions, she said, which left her at a higher risk. She’d become interested in medical authors skeptical of the profession, the adverse incentives of Big Pharma, and its conduct throughout the pandemic. “If I put some of the books from that list that I gave you on a banned books display, I would probably lose my job.”
“I don’t think I could have made it through the last three years. I thought about changing professions. I’d probably go into some kind of horticulture or naturopathy, but I don’t have the money for that. I don’t have anyone supporting me to help me get into a different career at this point. So I’m kind of waiting for fate to take over, and if I get fired because of things I’m saying or doing, then that’s what happens.”