“The American Library Association (ALA) president said Sept. 2 at the Socialism 2023 Conference in Chicago that libraries and public schools need to be sites of socialist organizing,” reports Campus Reform.
“I just want to say thank you for bringing up libraries and classroom libraries, but also school libraries of all kinds, public libraries and high educational libraries who have been under attack in similar ways,” ALA President Emily Drabinski said, in remarks captured in an audio recording
“Public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing,” Drabinski added. “I think libraries really do too … I haven’t seen that working in libraries. But I think there’s real opportunity here to both connect with happening in public education, what’s happening in libraries, but also we need some help in the libraries. We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”
The panel’s presenters, Wayne Au and Jesse Hagopian, had called for teachers to add Critical Race Theory (CRT) into classwork.
The media depicts the American Library Association as a non-partisan entity despite the fact that its president is a Marxist and its president, executive director, and staff are invariably staunchly leftists. When the ALA claims books are being “banned,” the media treats the claim as factual, even when the “book banning” just involves a sexually-explicit book being moved from one part of a school library to another part aimed at older readers, or a sexually-explicit book temporarily being withdrawn for review over summer vacation and then placed back in the library in time for any student to access it if the student wants.
The ALA is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with 49,727 members as of 2021.
State libraries in Montana, Texas, and Missouri announced this year that they have left the ALA, according to the Associated Press.
Legislators in at least nine states — Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — have called for public libraries in their states to take the same step.
