‘Public Education Needs to be a Site of Socialist Organizing’: ALA President
byBen Johnson
The public school and the local library “needs to be a site of socialist organizing,” said the head of the American Library Association (ALA) at a conference that advocated abolishing the family, replacing mothers and fathers with collective parenting, and forming a mass movement to protect children’s “right” to engage in prostitution. The association publicly distanced itself from Ms Drabinski’s statements, telling Newsmax in a statement the “ALA does not align with, endorse, or promote the political beliefs, values, or ideologies of any one individual — including its elected leaders.”
Emily Drabinski, the president of the American Library Association who describes herself as a “Marxist lesbian,” asked attendees of the Socialism 2023 conference in Chicago to turn schools and libraries into centers of radical agitation. At the September 1-3 conference, organized by more than 70 socialist organizations, Drabinski told speakers at one panel that she agreed with “your point that public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing. I think libraries really do, too. … Classroom libraries, but also school libraries of all kinds.” She added that “there’s a real opportunity here to both connect [what’s] happening in public education [with] what’s happening in libraries.”
“We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing,” she concluded.
Drabinski has bitterly denounced the “Christo-fascist Right” and “angry white mob parents organized to get a book off a library shelf,” allegedly because they “don’t want black people, Jewish people, gay people to exist at all.” Drabinski may have a personal stake in the issue: She confessed in a 2009 article that she first began to identify as a lesbian after reading a library book about two women having “fantastic queer sex in a field” as a teenager of “around 14.”
Drabinski’s allegations have echoed from the highest echelons of power, as President Joe Biden’s first campaign ad accused conservatives of “banning books.” In fact, concerned parents have objected to school libraries furnishing adolescents with such titles as Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer,” which contains explicit illustrations of a man-boy pedophilia, or Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” which contains a boy fondly reminiscing about performing fellatio on a grown man.
The ALA president’s statements came to light thanks to an undercover recording shared on Substack by Karlyn Borysenko, an anti-socialist writer who describes herself as “pro-choice” and considers the pro-life movement “insufferable.”
Despite Drabinski’s radicalism, “Montana is the only state so far that has removed its library system and its tax dollars from the ALA,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. State officials cited Drabinski’s socialism in their decision to cut ties with the ALA. “Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” said the Montana State Library Commission in its July 11 decision to disaffiliate with the ALA.
“Let’s hope this news leads many more states to follow,” said Kilgannon.
Conference Featured Drag Queens, Former FBI Most Wanted, Family Abolition, and Promotion of ‘Sex Work’
Drabinski’s comments came at the Socialism 2023 conference, held in Chicago September 1-3. Its opening plenary session featured Angela Davis, a former member of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List” for furnishing guns to Marxist criminals who used them to kill a judge. Davis studied under Critical Studies thinker Herbert Marcuse before becoming a two-time Communist Party USA vice presidential candidate.The conference included panels on:
- “Family Abolition Today,” which advocated replacing the family with a plethora of government programs. The panel’s “three leading family abolitionist scholars” included Sophie Lewis, who promotes surrogacy as a means of eradicating natural family relationships, and New York University Queer Studies professor E. O’Brien, author of “Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care”;
- “Kids as Comrades,” which discussed “best practices for developing socialist programming for kids”;
- “Resisting the Trad Wife Turn,” which sought to combat the emerging “‘pro-family, pro-labor’ agenda that casts abortion, feminism, and sexual liberty as neoliberal, capitalist innovations which exploit women”;
- “Sex Work, Policing and Border Abolition,” which called on socialists to advocate for “migrant sex workers” (illegal immigrants trafficked by international gangs) and promote “the abolition of police, prisons, borders and racial capitalism”;
- “Abortion and Trans Rights Under Attack,” which asked socialists, “How can we connect our two movements more concretely to effectively fight our common enemy,” the “Christian nationalist”?;
- “Religion, Marxism, and The Struggle Over Third Spaces,” which called on left-wing activists to radicalize houses of worship. “Religious institutions … remain an under-engaged terrain of struggle” for socialists, the panel argued, and activists should “organize in every corner of the working class,” the description stated;
- “SunDDay School: The Spirit of Socialism with Dream Defenders,” which discoursed on “the spiritual life of social movements,” complete with a “Spirit of Socialism” service — “an inspirational service that will celebrate how socialist politics can transform the human spirit!” Speakers told attendees, “In all things, we try and bring in … the spirit of our ancestors,” and that “socialism doesn’t just save lives; it saves souls”;
- “Lenin: Catastrophe and Revolution,” which presented communist dictator Vladimir Lenin as a “revolutionary icon” while emphasizing the supposedly “powerful democracy and collective struggles behind much of Lenin’s political thought.” (Lenin once wrote, “The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood, and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy.”);
- “Abortion, Race, and the 1%,” which accused “the capitalist class” of opposing abortion for “economic and racialized reasons”;
- “The Far Right, Border Abolition, and Anti-fascism in Crisis,” which demanded the “abolition” of all police, the release of all prisoners in jails, and the erasure of the U.S. border with Mexico, while insisting U.S. taxpayers “provide [health] care, housing, and support for” illegal immigrants;
- “Homosexuality and the Left in American History,” which discusses how leftists worked homosexuality “into their critiques of capitalism”;
- “The Longer Road to a Green New Deal,” which mourned the setback of democratic socialists’ signature legislation and pined for “transformative national legislation” to promote “public ownership” of goods and resources; and
- “Degrowth and Ecosocialist Revolution,” which explored the “consensus shared by the degrowth movement and revolutionary socialism.”
The conference held additional sessions dedicated to promotingcritical race theory, “Fighting Fascism in Florida,” and supporting “Ukraine’s Struggle for Self-Determination,” as well as a Naomi Klein presentation denouncing conspiracy theories.
“When the Left talks about ‘fundamentally transforming America,’ it’s serious. And it sees your local taxpayer-funded public library as a key hub of ‘socialist organizing,’” said former Reagan aide, presidential candidate, and Family Research Council president Gary Bauer.
The far-Left’s blatant politicization of public schools and institutions offers “a fascinating glimpse into how progressives think and act. When they are organizing, it’s totally normal, because they see themselves as the good guys, rescuing children or people from ‘hate’ or ‘injustice,’” Kilgannon told TWS. But when parents attend a school board meeting, “the screaming starts: ‘extremist,’ ‘racist,’ ‘anti-LGBT,’ ‘climate denier,’ ‘election denier,’ and on and on. From their perspective, our reaction to their socialist revolution is ‘extremism.’”
The conference’s radicalism reflects that of Emily Drabinski.
Drabinski Promotes the ‘Subversion’ of ‘Normal Family Types’
Before her election as the 2023-2024 ALA president last April, Drabinski said she planned to use her perch to “build collective power for the public good.” Her platform promised, “As ALA president, I will direct resources and opportunities to a diverse cross-section of the association,” dispersing the $56 million in revenue the ALA reported on its most recent 990 form “on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, national origin, spoken language, and disability.” In the process she won the endorsement of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a close Biden ally, who stated, “Emily Drabinksi knows how to organize and mobilize.”After her election, Drabinski exulted, “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 closed the tweet with the socialist salute, “Solidarity!”
Drabinski’s comrades at Jacobin, a socialist magazine, revealed she became radicalized as a child by environmentalist ideology, campaigning against styrofoam cups. She became incensed when her local union settled a labor dispute at Long Island University in September 2011 and invited the administration to share a celebratory sandwich together. “Labor struggle is a struggle,” she fumed. (Emphasis in original.) She ascended the union hierarchy, because she could “figure out how to turn your complaints into demands.”
Along the way, she has moved to seed radical LGBT ideology into public institutions at taxpayer expense. In 2013, Drabinski wrote an article titled “Queering the Catalog” about injecting Queer Theory into public libraries. As ALA president this April, Drabinski tweeted out a guide to planning Drag Queen Story Hour, after calling parental opposition “baffling.” She has stated libraries play a part in “the public project of raising children.” In a 2021 talk titled “Teaching the Radical Catalog,” Drabinski admitted her “queerness includes the subversion of … normal family types.”
Perhaps the most alarming thing about Drabinski’s efforts to indoctrinate America’s youth with left-wing ideology, Kilgannon said, is that “it is working. She will call for help from her fellow socialists to educate our children with subversive reading materials to bring about a cultural revolution. And she will get it.”
The best thing parents whose children attend public school can do is to “get your kids out and put yourself in,” said Kilgannon. “You can wish the public school system away, but it’s here and it’s not going anywhere; in fact, budgets are going up and mental health care is about to be delivered in public schools nationwide.”
“Get involved,” concluded Kilgannon. “The hour is late. But our children and our country are worth it.”
__________
This article reprinted by permission of The Washington Stand, the news and commentary outlet for the Family Research Council.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
