Librarians Go Radical as New Woke Policies Take Over: Experts

Marian the Librarian, the prim, bespectacled love interest of con artist Harold Hill in the classic musical, “The Music Man,” wouldn’t recognize her profession today.

Libraries, for decades the ultimate safe spaces, have become ground zero in the ongoing culture wars, with battles over banned books, drag queen story hours and free access to porn raging all over the country — from Louisiana to Idaho to Washington State as well as cities like New York and LA.

“The average person has no idea of this but librarians have been targeting children in recent years and trying to turn them into political activists,” said Dan Kleinman, a self-described “library watchdog” from Chatham, NJ, who has run a website called “Safe Libraries” for more than 10 years. He said he has documented the alarming radicalization of the nation’s libraries, including what he says is readily available porn in library computers.

“Librarians see themselves on the front lines on what it takes to bring revolution to the US. You need soldiers in the revolution so they are teaching kids to be little antifa activists who hate their own country and will act as a collective to bring about change.”

Many activists point to the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library organization in the world, as the driving force behind what they say is too radical an agenda.

The newly-elected head of the ALA — a self-described “Marxist lesbian” named Emily Drabinski — said she rose through the ranks the old-school way, from “looseleaf legal filer to library director.” But her mission is deadly serious.

“So many of us find ourselves at the ends of our worlds,” Drabinski said during her campaign to become ALA president. “The consequences of decades of unchecked climate change, class war, white supremacy, and imperialism have led us here. If we want a world that includes public goods like the library, we must organize our collective power and wield it. The American Library Association offers us a set of tools that can harness our energies and build those capacities.”

After Drabinski won, she posted on Twitter: “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 influential Chicago-based Fobazi Ettarh, 32, who was most recently a librarian at Rutgers, is another example of what many call a modern “radical librarian.” Ettarh, who is also an educator and writer, says she represents “librarianship, education, activism, and all the intersections in between.”

“People that say what librarians do in their own time, out of the library, is their own business. As if white supremacy is something you only do on weekends,” she wrote on her “WTF Is a Radical Librarian Anyway?” website.

“It is time to stop being shocked. [People of color] have been telling you this forever. Trans people have been telling you this forever. The disabled. The queer. Librarianship is not the last bastion of democracy. It is not inherently good and sacred. It is an institution. And like other institutions it is riddled with white supremacy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on, and on, and on… This is who we are.”

Supporters of so-called “woke” libraries say they simply want their facilities to be more diverse and inclusive when it comes to gender and race ideology. Opponents say that young children should not be exposed to books like Juno Dawson’s “This Book is Gay,” (a current No. 1 bestseller on Amazon), “Genderqueer” and “Lawn Boy,” which they say depict too-graphic illustrations of gay sex and are freely available to youths at public libraries.

Drag Queen Story Hour, which was launched in San Francisco in 2015, has become a mainstay for children at libraries all over the US and the UK. Drag queens in full regalia perform for children as young as two and three. Though at least two registered sex offenders were found to have been among the drag queens performing at a Houston public library in 2019, the program is still going strong.

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Meanwhile, librarians have been quitting around the country as communities have fought back against their radical agendas.

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