The Communist head of the American Library Association (ALA) said that public schools and libraries need to be “sites of socialist organizing” at the Socialism 2023 conference in Chicago over the weekend.
Self-avowed “Marxist Lesbian” Emily Drabinski was initially scheduled to be a featured speaker at the event, but her session was quietly canceled after conservative media publicized her Marxist leanings earlier this year, according to independent journalist Karlyn Borysenko, who infiltrated the event.
The Socialist conference featured dozens of far-left speakers, including infamous communists Bill Ayers and Angela Davis. The schedule included panels on “Kids as Comrades”; “The Environmental Injustices of American Capitalism”; “Putting Police Abolition into Practice”; “Fighting For Our Lives, Abortion and Trans Lives Under Attack”; “Sex Work, Policing and Border Abolition”; “Building a Utopian Socialist Vision”; “StopCopCity”; “Fighting Fascism in Florida”; “Family Abolition Today”; and “the Coming Transformation.”
The the four-day event also held “a radical drag show” and a screening on “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”
Although Drabinski was removed from the speaking roster, she still attended sessions at the conference, Borysenko reported, including a September 2 panel titled “Freedom to Learn: Black And Asian American Solidarity Against Attacks on Antiracist Education.” Presenters on this panel reportedly discussed “how to smuggle socialist ideas like Critical Race Theory into the classroom even when the law outlaws it,” according to Borysenko. They reportedly called the subversive effort “fugitive pedagogy.”
After the discussion, attendees were given the opportunity to comment and Drabinski got in line to speak.
When it was her turn, she said, “I just want to say thank you for bringing up libraries, and classroom libraries, but also school libraries of all kind, public libraries and higher education library who have been under attack in similar ways.”
Drabinski seemed to acknowledge in her comments that fellow Marxists use the education system to target children for indoctrination.
“I think your point that public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing—I think libraries really do too—and that happens,” she said.
Drabinski stressed in her convoluted remarks that there is a particular need for socialist “organizing” in libraries.
“But I think there’s real opportunity here to both connect with what is happening in public education, what’s happening in libraries, but also, we need help in the libraries. We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing,” she said.
The president of the American Library Association Emily Drabinski went to a Socialism conference in Chicago over the weekend and said “public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing. Libraries really do too.”
pic.twitter.com/VapoM6XPnj— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 4, 2023
Drabinski was elected president of the nonprofit American Library Association (ALA) in April of 2022, and proudly declared in July that she is a “Marxist lesbian.”
In a recent article, The Washington Times exposed Drabinski’s hostility toward Christianity and “normal family types.”
The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative opposition research group, delved into her previous articles, interviews and statements. In a memorandum, it concluded that “Emily Drabinski is a radical, self-avowed Marxist and queer activist.”
The memo quotes Ms. Drabinski as saying her “queerness includes the subversion of those kind of normal family types” by criticizing the “Christo-fascist right,” defending drag queen story hours and reimagining libraries as a “space based on an ideology that centered notions of queerness and difference rather than democracy and citizenship.”
She criticized the Dewey Decimal System for including “overwhelmingly Christian” works in a 2013 article headlined “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.”
In a 2019 article, she said libraries could respond to the election of President Trump by creating “research guides that help people understand how to resist authoritarian regimes.”
In 2022, Ms. Drabinski called it a “principle of librarianship” that “every reader has a right to decide for themselves what they read. And that includes children.”
The ALA is reportedly the oldest and largest library association in the world, with 49,727 members as of 2021.
Last year, over 50 public libraries denied or ignored actor and author Kirk Cameron’s requests for a story-hour slot to read his new children’s book. According to Cameron’s publisher Brave Books, however, every library it contacted had hosted “drag queen” story hours or other “queer friendly” programs for kids.
Brave Books was forced to rent out meeting rooms at American libraries to hold the Cameron events, which typically draw overflow crowds, the Times reported.
The ALA also allegedly offered pointers on how to thwart a “See You at the Library” event hosted by Brave Books last month.
Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) have also called on the Institute of Museum and Library Services to halt all federal funding to the ALA pending the outcome of an investigation into the alleged discrimination against Brave Books.
“The ALA should not be eligible to receive federal funding should an investigation find that the ALA violated the First Amendment rights of Americans,” the senators’ July 28 letter said.
Republican lawmakers across the nation appear to be slowly waking up to the far-left’s capture of the nation’s public libraries and are increasingly calling for the ALA to be defunded.
The State Freedom Caucus Network has taken a lead on the effort, calling on states to “ensure that no taxpayer dollars can be used by these associations or by state and local libraries to support the ALA in any way.”
“Our libraries are local treasures,” the network said in an Aug. 3 open letter. “We will not let them be overrun and held hostage by a radical organization acting well outside what its core mission should be.”
The Montana State Library Association voted in July to break off from the American Library Association, saying the state constitution “forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” the Times reported. Texas has also ditched the ALA, according to the paper.