librarypunk - 027 - Intellectual Fweedom (no steppy)

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

We got Sam back on to talk about intellectual freedom and give us our regular Canada Library Shenanigans update.  https://www.spopowich.ca/blog/irreversible-damage https://www.spopowich.ca/blog/irreversible-damage-part-two https://www.spopowich.ca/blog/the-populism-of-intellectual-freedom https://litwinbooks.com/books/in-solidarity/ Sam’s twitter: https://twitter.com/redlibrarian

I want to bet one time because I was like, I bet you that band is going to do working class blues for their sound check song because my dad's a musician. He's like, that's what every band does. They do working, uh, working man blues. It's a really good sound check song for gig work. And I was right. So I wonder what the podcast like working man blues is. It's probably, are we recording?

Are we recording? Are we recording? Are we recording? Can you hear me? How many levels? Are we recording? I'm Justin. I'm a Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I'm a sysadmin at a public library. My pronouns are she and they. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian and my pronouns are he him. I'm Carrie. I'm a health scientist librarian and my pronouns are she, her. And we have a guest. Returning guest. I'm Sam. I'm an academic librarian in Canada. My pronouns are he.

Do we force a catchphrase upon Sam too? Yeah, we've got to find your catchphrase. Repeat guest rule. This is what I expect from this podcast. Exactly. We forced one upon Matthew. Yes, another quest for a perfect catchphrase. I can feel it in my bones. To be forever enshrined in a drop. Yeah.

It's going to be our white whale today. So there's a lot to talk about, so we're going to skip the segment, because there is discourse happening. I should have had a horse neigh. I wonder if I can, I'll put one in post. It's a discourse. I got to save that clip. Yeah.

I try not to make drops out of carry all the time. You're the worst host. I feel like it would be rude. But anyway, we are gathered here today. discourse about, well, what did happen? We're talking about intellectual freedom, hashtag no stepi. And there was some intellectual freedom tomfoolery going on in the Queens dominion of Canada. So, Sam, what happened exactly? So for the last, I don't know, several months, there have been efforts to challenge Abigail Schreier's irreversible damage book in a few

Canadian libraries. The most notable one was in Halifax Public Library on the East Coast, where I can't remember all the details now, but I think they were successful in challenging the book and having it removed from the collection. But there have been challenges in public libraries across the country. And the Canadian Federation of Library Association, which is what we sort of have in place of a national association, came out with a statement, you know, backing up libraries who were holding firm on not giving into challenges to exclude the book from collections. So as usual, whenever the CFLA, intellectual freedom statements come out, a bunch of us, a lot of people got criticized it on the grounds that they were very selective. They haven't moved their intellectual freedom.

position in decades. They continue to hold to the same world arguments. It's exactly the same as with the Office of Intellectual Freedom in the U.S. But Lindsay McCallin, who's a librarian, also in the East Coast, I think, had found that the CFLA over the last five years has only ever put out statements about intellectual freedom supporting anti-trans speakers and books. So one of the things that we kind of all cottoned onto was just that sort of selectivity piece that they don't weigh in on any other intellectual freedom challenges except if they're supporting trans music speakers, trans music books, that kind of thing. And so that was really where it all got started. And could you explain transmesic? I don't think that's commonly used. No. I don't remember where

I first came across it, but certainly in kind of the discourse around disability, really, there's been a push to try to get away from the language of phobias because of the sort of stigma around intellectual disability. So replacing transphobia with transmisia because, well, partly from the disability angle and partly because we're not talking about necessarily a fear of queer people, a fear of trans people. We're talking about a hatred of queer people and trans people. So it sort of gets at that a little bit more directly, I hope.

So I've tried to start using it. I don't always use it. It sort of depends on the audience, but when I'm writing blog posts where I feel like the audience is a bunch of, you know, critlib type librarians and library workers. I try to use it. I don't know. I don't know if it's, that's, that's my take on it anyway. I have used that term and find it like homoemicio, transmissia, I find those to be at least like in a nuanced conversation more useful

in actually describing the behaviors and the attitudes than the term. like transphobia, trans music. So, yeah. I just call them hateful assholes. Yeah, most trans people I know, including disabled trans people, don't use it. But I definitely agree that the definition fits more. Can I say something really quickly about the specific book in question? No.

Yes, of course. Okay. Well, because I think it will lead into what we're discussing as well. So, you know, most, most transmesia are transphobia, and I'm not trying to be like a, well, these people get people mad at them more, and that's better, like, kind of thing. I'm not trying to be one of those trans guys. But like overall, most viturial towards trans people in the public light is towards trans women and trans feminine people. This book, however, Irreversible damage is specifically about trans men.

transmasculine people because it's the craze seducing our daughters is the tagline of it. So it's this whole book, especially that sort of comments on the sort of rapid onset gender dysphoria that isn't real and has been disproven. That seems to affect our young daughters. And so it seems like a book that very much is trying to protect white womanhood, especially white motherhood and it's seeing like trans masculine people as a threat to like the cover of the book is a young girl with a circle cut out where her womb would be if it tells you anything about the book like it's a little like dick and jane type girl illustration and she's got a whole cut out of her in her abdomen that's distasteful as fuck yeah so that that book specifically is um sort of a like the trans people are transing our daughters, you know, who are only doing this because misogyny kind of thing. So libraries being like, no, we have to have this because intellectual freedom is, in fact,

just supporting this, like, fascist idea of protecting white womanhood so that women can become mothers. So just wanted to, like, clarify that for people, like, the specific intention of this book. Yeah, no, that's good. I forgot to say anything about the book. Yeah. So the play we're all sort of familiar with by these IF Edge Lords, which I believe the phrase was coined by free. So I'm going to give her credit.

She seems to be very, I asked her if she really came up with the term. So she seems pretty happy to take ownership of coming up with the term IF Edge Lords. So I'm going to stick with that. And the playbook was, you know, what you consider, like libraries need to be neutral. libraries should be warehouses where every book lives. And interestingly, they argue this is somehow prior restraint, which is disingenuous and just patently not true because it's not what prior restraint means. Like the books are published. Like you just, no one's forced to buy them.

And Sam, you point out that it's a completely disingenuous point that they're making in order to tie in the state. can you talk a little bit about CFLA and moral panics and sort of as you brought in Thatcherism? Sure. So the reason I mentioned Thatcherism specifically is because, so I'm doing a political theory dissertation on intellectual freedom, its sort of own intellectual background, which is all of the people that the kind of dominant IF people refer to like John Stuart Mill. or Habermas. But I'm looking a lot at the work of Stuart Hall, who was a cultural theorist and sociologist, who wrote a lot about the way that in the transition to neoliberalism in the 70s, there was kind of a dominant Marxist view that what was going on was, could simply be described in terms of class struggling class relationships, that the working class wouldn't be bought off by or seduced by Thatcher because they would understand that what neoliberalism was

doing in terms of austerity, in terms of precarity, cutting back the social safety net and the welfare state went against their interests. In fact, what Thatcherism did prior to getting, prior to Thatcher getting elected in 1979, that the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative Party had gone to great lengths to build up an ideological project of support. So to win people, win, you know, the silent majority, which is the Nixon's term, win the silent majority over to its conservative project. And one of the main ways that it did that was by creating a series of moral panics in Britain mainly around race. And so Hall argues that a particularly kind of homegrown 1970s kind of racism develops in England at the time, which was used both to get white voters.

to back up the Thatcher right wing of the Conservative Party, but also to increase funding and militarization of the police. And Hall calls that Britain drifting into a law and order society. And a lot of that resonates with me, with things that we've seen in the last decade or so around police expenditure, police armament, and then the demonization of others. So what I've been saying in recent blog posts

is that there's clearly a worldwide moral panic going on around trans people, which is essentially trying to do the same thing that the moral panic around black crime was trying to do in Britain in the 70s, and secure, as Jay said, secure the support of various sections of the white cis population, basically, for political purposes. And what I try to argue in terms of libraries and intellectual freedom is that libraries and library associations are playing into these hands. They are, they are, Whittingly or unwittingly, completely complicit in this project. And they don't see it because they don't want to see it

and because they don't engage with any of the criticisms that are coming. And that's true in the U.S. and it's true in Canada. So that's where the kind of moral panic, Thatcherism, CFLA pieces come together, I think. You summarized it, a couple of your pieces is saying, there's people we are allowed to other, and then the library sort of just says, Oh, yeah, well, it turns out trans people's rights are up for debate,

and therefore we should be collecting materials on this. And so there's only certain people you get to do that, too, as time goes by. But the group can change, and it's more or less constructed in the moment for political convenience. It could be circular for all we know. I wore my this is the age of sin trans shirt today, just for the occasion. Reject the order of creation, baby. Yeah, and I mean, we've seen this before. Obviously, we saw it with black people in Britain in the 70s.

We saw it with gay people in the 80s. In Canada, we've seen it with indigenous people going back decades. And it is circular. It is a cycle where we might go through a period where indigenous people, for example, are not demonized as a socially disruptive other in Canada. And then they're brought back to play that role again. And that's constructed by the media. constructed by libraries, constructed by schools.

So sometimes, you know, a new player enters the scene or enters the discourse, and sometimes we just go back to an old tried and true group that it's safe to other, for sure. And then so how do we tie in for people who might not have read your work yet, but they should so they understand the context of this conversation. How are we tying in this intellectual freedom? Don't tread on me. Please, no stepy, treading people. and their connection to the police and to government institutions.

How do we make that connection clear to people? Isn't it a contradiction? That's what people would say. I mean, I think it's been interesting throughout the pandemic. You see a lot of even left-wing people, when faced with a crisis, a lot of times the only option that they can see as available is state power. So when you don't know how to enforce something socially, a lot of people have this reaction that they look for state power. And that's sort of complicated

or made a bit more interesting by the fact that what we might think of in the kind of global North and West as authoritarian countries like China and Vietnam have had a better, or at least in the beginning, had a better pandemic response than the so-called liberal democracies of the West. And so there's a sense in which whenever these crises come up, we've been ingrained by the the longstanding state and police machine to say, well, the only way to respond to this is through more state power and more police power. And I think that this construction of consent plays off that kind of easy answer, I guess. And so the people who feel that the social order is being disrupted, feel that their natural or God-given rights are being threatened, it makes sense for

them to look to the police and the state to protect them because they've had the police protecting their rights basically forever. And I think there's a note in the podcast notes here, that problematizes this whole question of rights, which we also need to dig into at some point, because that too, like referring to the state and the police as the solution to social problems, that too becomes kind of an easy answer that doesn't really get us any further, if that makes sense. Yeah, we can definitely talk about like the liberal and socialist conceptualization next. but I'm just trying to make it concrete. So in a situation where, for instance, I think there were several events that you mentioned

where people were protesting the author or other TERFs and it responds with... I believe the plural is Terves. Terves? Well, I've also seen that on Twitter so that Terps... Also, they're not really feminist. I mean, that's a no true Scotsman argument. I would, they are. There's no feminism there.

They hate being called it and I love it. Yeah, I, but I actually. I really do, actually. I would say the use of Terves. I've seen that a lot so that Turf's keyword searching turf on Twitter, like, won't see that then. Well, don't tell them our secrets. Yeah. But that's what I've seen that.

Or like Turvin is what I've seen. A lot of trans women use. Like the elven, but worse? Yeah, like the turban. The torven. Yeah. Or like toxin, like oxen. Yeah.

Trans. Yeah, we've drifted too far. But they, you know, they did the thing where they call the police to say, you can't at me, more or less. A whole society of people who don't want to be criticized for saying that a group of people can't exist or shouldn't exist or should be medicalized out of, existence. So I don't bring this up as a like, but slippery slope argument, but with the concept, like bringing policing into this. And I was wondering if Sam maybe had any thoughts. And maybe you've

spoken about this elsewhere in your writing and I've missed it. Something I always worry about, because I'm not like, oh, well, we can't do this because blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, for example, in instances where universities have sort of listened to protest and be like, okay, well, we will stop inviting certain people to campus that always gets like turned against like Palestinian speakers and whatnot because it's disruptive and whatnot. And so like I always have this concern of are the people enforcing these things the same sort of ideological bent that I am? Or is this another thing that's going to be weaponized against other people, especially if any form of policing it or enforcing it is involved? And I'm not saying the

solution to that is like free for all collect everything but I was just wondering like especially with you know just to bring up the concept of like policing this the concept of oh well in our collection development we don't allow this or we remove this how do you see a way of like protecting against weaponizing that I guess I mean it probably connects with with what Justin's asking so my view of the problem is that when we have a power a power structure when we we have a university administration or the state or the police force. And we look for them to tiebreak, essentially. We look for them as the kind of the arbiter of what's going to be allowed and what isn't. And so then no matter which way they decide, whether it's the way that we agree

with or the way that we don't agree with, you end up in this position where the decision is enforced on whoever constitutes the society under them, whether it's the student body or society at large. And that, to me, is where the problem is. All of this, if we had a real difference of opinion among equals between what kind of Palestinian material to collect or what kind of trans material to collect, and we didn't have this overarching power dynamic, power structure, then we could work it out for ourselves in a way that we were satisfied with. And that might mean some people leave the group. That might mean, you know, whatever it means. But at least we would take direct responsibility for it. And the problem,

The problem that I see is that when we don't have that and we have an authority that we can refer to, we do refer to that authority. The authority makes a decision and imposes it on the rest of us, and that's where the problem comes in. And this is why people get a bit weird. They don't get a bit weird. They have a bit of a weird response when I talk that way as a sort of self-confessed Marxist because they expect me to be a big socialist state person. But I'm actually on the more anarchist end of communism saying that we've got to take responsibility for making these decisions for ourselves. And only in that way can we avoid the double bind that Jay described, I think. And does that get at kind of the, how the police being kind of the, again, this kind of neutral arbiter over social arguments or social debates, that kind of fits in there.

Right. So when you don't have a real answer to trans protesters and allies outside of Toronto Public Library protesting and trans music speaker, you don't try to deal with it. you just call in the police, right? It's, you know, we could have tried to deal with it. We could have had discussions. There were ample opportunity, but the government and the police and the library never listened to anyone. They just made their decision and imposed it.

It's like the library board of trustees or whatever it was, was also in like a police role and that as well, like not just the actual cops that were there, but like taking away from like the actual library workers. Yeah. And I think that's where the collection development piece comes in, which is when CFLA puts out a statement saying, this book should be included no matter what, then all of a sudden, library workers' abilities to make collection decisions is taken away from them, right? Now no library worker is going to be able to say, well, for all kinds of information literacy,

you know, relevance, harm questions, we still can't refuse to collect this book because the CFLA is set on to. Not that they have any actual power over library decisions, but, you know, like the ALA, they kind of exercise a hegemony over us. Even though we can refuse to collect other things. That's the kicker, right? We refuse to collect certain things all the time. That is in fact what selection means.

I love the point that you make, and I think I had also, I don't know if I made the point after reading you or not probably, but that like this sort of like, you know, in like some sort of ideal world, we might be able to have something from a viewpoint, but like we don't have unlimited money, nor do we have unlimited space.

And so like this idea is like, we can't have that to begin with just because it's physical spaces. And even digital requires like servers and stuff. Absolutely. And it's kind of a longstanding, you know, Leninist idea that in a class society, that kind of equality of collection or universality can't exist

because you live in a class society. And when you add in all of the other structures of oppression and difference, that just makes the problem worse, right? We can't neutrally try to collect everything in a patriarchal society and a white supremacist society and a trans music society for the exact same reasons that we couldn't when we were only thinking in terms of class so yeah yeah yeah and Sadie's point about like that's not a collection yeah yeah so I think that clicked it for me the state power comes in when the library is saying well you know my dad said we have to collect

turf shit so it's that's how it relies back into the the institutional power and stuff like that. So I think that made the connection clear in my head. Hopefully it helped for other people. So let's talk about this the liberal and socialist conceptions of rights, which was rights that are given to us, and you mentioned God given earlier, versus rights that are that are continually fought for. And I think I saw a tweet today where someone said, you know, the civil rights struggle is the civil rights struggle of our time. It's, it's ongoing. It's a relation, not a not a legal thing. Yeah, so there's a, we have a sort of performative in that, in that J.L. Austin, Judith Butler's sense. We have a performative way of talking about rights where on the one hand,

it seems as though if we simply say it, you know, if we simply say housing is a human right, that that will somehow make it true in the world, that all we need to do is say it and that the actual political and social reasons why there are unhoused people will go away. And I think to me that comes out of the liberalism was based originally on this idea of natural law and natural rights to things like private property and an individual, you know, self-agency and that kind of thing. But that got, liberalism couldn't really depend on that at the end of the Second World War for all kinds of reasons.

And so they came up with the idea that, well, we'll have a UN Charter of Rights, sort of based on the French Revolution rights, and we will grant those to people, right? That will be an indication that those are things that we, the global governing liberal elite, will grant to people. And everybody, you know, once we say that those are in effect, then they're in effect, and everyone can stop worrying. People won't have to struggle for rights. States will be required to ensure those rights, and everything will be hunky-dory,

and the nice liberal order can proceed. And Hall, again, makes the point that that was never the case, that the rights enshrined in the UN Charter of Rights, had just been fought for in a certain extent by living through the First World War, the Depression, the Second World War, and that the liberal order was threatened by a bunch of people, the vast majority of the planet, who felt that they didn't have any rights.

And so they had to come up with this way of doing it. And as things like the Civil Rights Movement showed, rights aren't simply granted by a liberal state. They constantly have to be fought for. Once they are one and enshrined in a law, the state is always looking to go back on them or undermine them. And so they constantly have to be fought to be secured. And Hall says that's a difference that there's a liberal and a socialist way of thinking about rights. And I'm not sure that's necessarily a socialist way of thinking about rights. I think there's kind of a vast swath of social justice movements, which aren't necessarily socialist, which have that idea of rights as constantly needing to be struggled for.

But also, I don't think every socialist thinks that. I think there are certain amounts, certain tendencies within socialism that would also like to believe that if we simply claim a right verbally, that that will be it. Or if a right is recognized by the state, that that's it, that's the end of story. And I mean, you know, the overturning, the sort of quiet, not quiet, quiet is the wrong word, but the sort of backhanded overturning of Roe versus Wess, is kind of the classic example of this, right? We know that the right in the US has had this in its sites for decades. They've been waiting for the moment.

They've been preparing to struggle for it. They succeeded. And yet on the left, there was kind of this idea that, and obviously not throughout the entire left and definitely not among most feminist groups, but there's definitely an idea among certain proportions of the population that once Roe v. Wade was enshrined in a court decision, that was it. It could never be undermined.

And we have a similar thing in Canada, around abortion and around guns, because we have different, because the history here is a little bit different, but it follows similar pattern for sure. Yeah, you can't do an abortion with a gun. I just thought it was worried how you linked those two together. I just got the idea of like this, Justin. I just got the idea of like using like abortions as like bullets or something. I just think of that little, little hot dog that was made into a person and someone's like, that's abortion. It reminds me of when there was the like, you know, Biden won the election, but is Trump going to actually leave when the time comes around? And everybody was like, but the, you know, all of the government will come kick him out if he doesn't.

And I was like, you know, rights and laws are only as effective as we enforce them. Like if we just decide not to enforce that rule, it's not like God's going to come down and be like, get out of here. So yeah, that's what this is reminding me of. It's like these things are only as valid as we enforce them to be. Yeah, and I think that's, there's a political tradition of thinking in terms of constituent power where the government, the state, would love it if constituent power, consular power is needed to give legitimacy to a constitution. But once that happens, they would love it if constituent power could just go away

and everyone could just trust the state to take care of its own business. but that in fact constituent power, the requirement for all of us to take responsibility, and if necessary, you know, enforce what we think the right should be or enforce what we think the law should be devolves to us, again, in moments of political crisis. And so, you know, if the January 6th storming of the Capitol hadn't been resolved in the way that it was, potentially the multitude of constituent power in the U.S. and North America might have had to step in and institute its own status quo. We're doing good on time.

So I'm going to ask about the CFLA letter and John Kay, who was sniffing around. And I had to make sure we didn't end up in a collat article with a bunch of assholes sending us DMs. But what was the letter? Because I never saw it. And what was the response to it? So I don't think that whole thing has,

been wrapped up yet. I'd have to check with some people who were involved. And while I would like to give them credit, I think I maybe also don't want to name them on the podcast just because of the attention that potentially that could garner. It's possible to find out who was involved in the writing of the letter, and I think they did great work. So after the CFLA put out its statement on supporting the irreversible damage, supporting libraries and not giving into challenges to irreversible damage. And as I said earlier, Lindsay McCallum noted that there was a pattern to the selectivity of CFLA statements on intellectual freedom. A group of librarians decided to write an open letter, and they took a week or so to draft what I think was a really clear argument against, both

against the inclusion of Schreier's book on professional collections development grounds and on the CFLA's very selective stance on intellectual freedom, backed up with all kinds of evidence. I mean, it had as many footnotes as an academic article supporting its points. It was really well done. And so it was circulating for signatures. And over the few days that it was up, I think it got nearly 300 signatures. I think that's the right number. So quite a lot. And one of the things that I think we were, those of us who signed the letter we're hoping, is quite often, you know, the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom or the CFLA are able to say, well, the people criticizing intellectual freedom don't understand it, and they're a minority anyway. And so the idea that 300 librarians in Canada, and, you know, we have way fewer librarians and library workers in Canada than in the U.S., 300 people were prepared to put their name on this open letter, indicated that this was a real, there was a real difference of opinion here among professionals. So this wasn't just, you know, you know, a handful of SJWs. This wasn't just a small minority of people in the library community in Canada.

This was a sizable number. And John Kay, who is a journalist, I think, and is part of that group around Quillette, Quillet. And so whatever right-wing, weird conspiracy, free speech group circulates around that, he got a hold of it. He heard about the letter, and he essentially sicked. his Twitter followers onto it, basically saying, you know, flood it with garbage and make it unusable and break it, DDoS it, essentially. Which they started to do, at which point the organizers of the letter had to make the letter signing private, which, of course, make the letter private and take down the ability for people to add their names.

And then I think the plan was to submit it to CFLA. It was directed at the CFLA board, because one of the things that the Intellectual Freedom Committee has been clear about is that their statements come out, basically they're solicited by or controlled by or approved by the board. So it's really the board that is taking responsibility for the intellectual freedom statement. So the letter was aimed at the board. It had to be taken down so quickly that a lot of people were surprised, you know, that they'd seen it, talked about. They couldn't find the letter. But also it meant that we probably didn't get as many signatures on it as we could have, but we still got a sizable number.

So I don't think that we've heard anything from the CFLA. I suspect we won't, just because that's the nature of intellectual freedom debate in Canada. I don't think they'll even acknowledge it. If they do, that would be great. But that's the story of the CFLA letter. And I think we're kind of waiting for potentially the other shoe to drop. Yeah, I thought it was pretty. So I had to ask around who this dude was.

And I thought it was pretty funny that he basically, as far as I understand, and you don't have to comment on this because I know libel laws are different in your country. But he basically wrote his mom's coattails into journalism. And I think it's really funny that the best he managed even doing that was Quillette. There was something a few years ago where he was part of a group of Canadian writers. If I remember this rightly, it was Canadian writers claiming their right to write from any perspective. So essentially to adopt, let's say, an indigenous persona while writing. And that caused a minor stir here.

But I think that drove a certain number of those writers to sort of go full right wing, more or less. And I think he was part of that group. He's probably a bigger deal in Canada. I mean, he's not a huge deal, but he's a bit of a deal in Canada. Better known, probably not known a mistake at all. No, I'd never heard of him.

But we've skimmed on the topic of talking about how, you know, if you don't have collection development, it's just a warehouse, you just have everything, and it undermines the judgment of library workers to, you know, take ownership for this is why I'm purchasing this thing and this is why I'm not purchasing this other thing. How does that tie into populism and the whole concept of populism as you started fleshing it out and talking about populism and reactionary movements? Could you give us a like a rundown of populism? I don't know if that's too broad. It might be a bit broad. How does populism pull into this intellectual freedom debate? So one of the things that I noticed as I was reading Hall is in the last, at least since 2016, with the election of Trump and 2019, the election of Boris Johnson, there had been, there was an explosion of discussion in political science circles around populism and specifically right-wing populism.

And so you have Victor Orban in Hungary, you've got Lukashenko in Belarus, you've got Putin and Russia, all of whom, like Johnson and Trump, take on a right-wing populist view or persona or attitude where basically they say, we're on your side against the government. We're on the side of, you know, guns, the flag and apple pie or whatever the American national symbols are. You've brought up common sense. Like common sense is what we're fighting for. We're fighting. for common sense, and that's how you can say that trans people are not trans. Yeah, so these populist leaders will say that we're defending, you know, a kind of realistic common sense view of the world against a liberal conspiracy to destroy your values and your way of life. And they all do it from the slightly different details, right? Putin will do it slightly differently than Boris Johnson, but essentially that's the playbook. And when I was reading Hall, Hall made the exact same argument about Thatcher and Lowe.

Reagan, that they did the exact same thing. Thatcher was able to say, we are going to protect your English way of life against the liberal conspiracy to flood English streets with black immigrants, right? Essentially was the original Thatcherite line on immigration. And lots of right-wing figures in Britain took that line. And so I think that the intellectual freedom piece ties into that, it only ties into it indirectly in a way. Intellectual freedom says it's up to everybody to come up with their own common sense, which seems like a sort of laudable idea, right? Everybody's going to make their own intellectual explorations.

They're going to come to their own conclusions, et cetera, et cetera. But without a power analysis, without an understanding of the political realities, that neutral line, the same as always, becomes part of whatever political project is going on. So if the political project is the extension of authoritarian right-wing populism, intellectual freedom will be used to support that. And it's kind of an empty signifier or a piece of silly putty that can be shaped into whatever the dominant political project happens to be at the time. And the dominant political project for the last five years in North America has been

right-wing populism. And it's, again, I think that's why I know there are some librarians here who think that groups like the CFLA or people like the public, library CEOs absolutely know that they are participating in this project of the entrenchment of right-wing populism. I'm not sure. I tend to think that they're doing it unwittingly that they just haven't really thought too much about their position. And so they're being taken advantage of they're being used as shills for the right. But that's how those pieces connect for me anyway. Yeah. People who imagine they have no ideology tend to do that. Absolutely. And having no ideology is

the liberal thing. Yeah, God is in his heaven. Yeah, I think you can draw a straight line, because I just did on my notes with a pencil, from the protecting common sense to rejection of authority. Because like you said, it sounds like everyone's making up their own mind, but it actually takes away accountability from us to make our own decisions as library workers and say, I'm going to select this because it's what our community needs. and, you know, it's, I'm not going to select this because it's garbage and it's hateful and it's probably going to even cause harm to someone.

And so you, you reject what limited authority you have as a, as a library and selecting books in favor of this common sense, which is somehow independently, but not really independently come to. It's actually just a reflection of the status quo and people who don't have ideology have common sense. And I think my main beef with the dominant intellectual freedom position is that it still holds on to this idea that the world is composed of individuals who must be allowed to make all their own decisions and choices and rejects any idea of social construction, the fact that we are born into a society that pre-exists us, and we take on all kinds of cultural and linguistic and ideological and intellectual. positions either straight or we react to them and take the opposite or something like that, we're constructed by the society that we're born into. And they refuse to even engage with the idea of social construction. So something that you've brought up through this whole conversation is this idea of like if we say it, you know, there's this idea that if we say it will make it so or, you know, things along that line. And I was wondering if you had any opinions or had seen any

discourse happening around like the role of magical thinking in this sort of like ideology free intellectual freedom idea of like well if we you know say well people have the right to check out whatever they want for whatever reason you know we hope it's for a good reason and by thinking that that makes it so or if we say we have this right then it it makes it so so I didn't know if any if you were I see Justin has his hand up now about like the role of magical thinking in this discussion. Is this another thing that we can blame on Harry Potter? Absolutely.

That's all I had to say. Yes. So I think that's a really great question. I don't think I've seen anything specifically framing it in that way, but it seems so obvious that, you know, let's say nice suburbanite, white liberal people are living in a kind of fantasy utopia where there. Not only do they think things are a certain way, but they think that if they say it, yeah, exactly. If they think that they say it, that that'll make it that way.

And I think that's kind of at the heart of the Karen, you know, speak to a supervisor mean, right? That those are the magical words that will solve all the problems and make the world go back to, that will restore order to a universe that has become disordered for that person, right? Something has happened. The world doesn't go according to plan. and the magical words of, you know, let me speak to your supervisor, is the incantation that will restore order to think. And a lot of this comes back to that common sense, social order.

And Hall has this great quote in, he has an article, I think, called, I think it's in the whites of their eyes about the role the media plays and the construction of this fantasy utopia, including aspects of the liberal conspiracy and aspects of crime. Because every utopia, every Garden of Eden needs a snake, right? And so the media will go to great lengths to make sure that it constructs this properly. And at one point, he says regular people, ordinary people, the silent majority, are being forced to say that black is white. And he was writing that in like 1981 or something like that.

But that whole idea that, you know, people in Middle America are being forced to not say Merry Christmas or are being forced to say that a thing is its opposite is part of this. It's the exact same liberal conspiracy playbook that Hall was writing about in the 70s and 80s is back now. It's just the thing that people in their kind of comfortable common sense land are being forced to lie about in their view has changed. And that's socially disruptive. And that is a terrifying thought that the world is crumbling all around them. All of their certainties are being erased. every truth is being turned on its head. And then when they feel that their comfortable truths and their certainties are being destroyed,

then they look to the police to come in and restore order. That's kind of how all that ties back together. Cool. So let's get to the action-oriented part. What is to be done? And I put just dealing with IF Edge Lords in general, I figure like ignoring them is pretty good. Blocking them on Twitter is pretty fun. yelling at them, calling them assholes is fun.

But if we wanted to be like actually constructive and serious, how do we focus agitation or how do we focus organization? Any ideas, Sam? I think, I actually think, and it probably doesn't feel this way in the U.S. because you have so many more people involved, but the Canadian library community is small enough. I think we're actually starting to see some change.

I think we're starting to see some movement. I think enough people have been hammering on these points now for so long, and the context is becoming clearer and clear, right? The fact that the challenging of the Shire book, for example, isn't happening in some kind of vacuum, that it is happening in a wider context of anti-trans, hate, things like that, is becoming so unavoidable. I think we're starting slowly to see some movement on that up here. but that's being done by kind of individual people hammering at things, trying to get into conference programs and that kind of. So it's all very like academic and intellectual. At the Toronto Public Library, when Megan Murphy was booked to speak, there was a really big

protest. About a thousand people, I think, were there, if not more. It was a peaceful protest. And at one point, they staged a read-in. And the fact of the read-in made me connect it to grassroots pressure. on Winnipeg Public Library in the same year. Winnipeg Public Library had instituted airport style security. They're in the heart of downtown Winnipeg, which has, I think it still has the largest urban indigenous population in Canada, huge racism problems, huge socioeconomic inequality

problems, and what they decided to do for staff and public safety was to implement security, which it essentially mean that poor indigenous people couldn't come into the library. And some of the people in the group that were really pushing hard on Winnipeg Public Library to change this policy, there were some library people, there were some academics, there were some community members. And one of the academics, my understanding is that her area is in, you know, social justice organizing and labor organizing and that kind of thing. And they did a talk at the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Libraries Conference earlier this year where they talked about the results of that organization. and the kinds of things that they had thought about. And I think it's that. I think that in addition to sort of the intellectual struggle that some of us are undertaking in conferences and in journal articles and stuff like that,

there is also space for real grassroots organizing for specific things. So the group in Winnipeg, which called Millennium for All, had a specific goal, which was to get the gates, security gates taken down. And they pursued that single-mindedly through the course of the year and eventually got a done. And I think it's that. I think it's that kind of organizing around very specific goals, which will potentially then further the larger strategy of what we want to see. I mean, this is typical left-wing organizing. This is typical labor organizing talk. And I'm not well-versed in this. I'm not as well-versed in this as I should be. But there are lots of people in the library world who are. And so I think it's that. I think in terms of the action-oriented question,

that's what we need to be doing. But I totally am not the person to know how to get that. going. There's some book about libraries and union organizing is a historical one, and I'm looking for the title right now. Yeah, something I heard recently was the real way to make organizing, I think it was so specific to like libraries and academia was you not are just going to focus on old-fashioned labor organizing, but you're also going to get the community involved. If you're a teacher, you're getting the students involved. You're getting everyone on your side about this issue. And that's how you're going to build momentum rather than just like, oh, we'll have one big strike and we'll, you know, as much.

I am a member of the IWW, but I don't think there is going to be a one big strike. It's not going to happen. But you can get a community together and say, look, we're all doing this for our collective benefit. This is what we want. And then I'll put that link that Jay found in the next. notes. I think I own this book, but I haven't read it. So if it's like garbage, let me know. It's in solidarity, academic librarian, labor activism, and union participation in Canada. It seems to be an edited volumes. Yeah, as soon as Sam said that, I was like, wait a minute,

there's a book about that, I think. So. Yeah, Dustin, what you were saying just reminds me of something Alison McRena said in the Library Freedom Project, Crash Course was It's really all about relationships. Like, if you can't get it done now, then maybe you should refocus on the relationship building around it to actually get that community part first before the organizing kind of deal. So, yeah, I think those are really good, really good points. I don't know if much of this is filtered into American library discourse, but in Canada, that aspect of relationality and, relationship building is huge in not just in indigenous activism, but also in sort of research by and with and about indigenous people is that whole sense of relationship building. And so

that's what we need to be able to bring that in to all of these levels of discussion and action. But of course, the alienation of capital means, the alienation of capitalism means that it's increasingly difficult for us to build any of those kinds of relationships. So we're struggling against the grain, but that's what struggle is. So yeah, absolutely. Go ahead, Jay. Yeah, the thing that I was going to say is, you know, I think at least in like, I don't say popular, but sort of like, I guess, mainstream leftism and social justice activism, there's this tendency to sort of organize against broad ideas and ideology, which, like, yes,

but also it's really hard to see any sort of material gain in that when we're just like, facts, facts, facts. And then that largely, like, you know, we believe in science. It's like, okay, those other people don't. You know, we're kind of not, I don't want to say meeting them where they're at, but, you know, they've already heard us say this. And so, like, this move towards, like, no, we're going to organize against this very specific local issue that can have, like, we can see when we've succeeded. Like, that sort of very, I wouldn't call it direct action, but it's very sort of focused, you know, you do things on a local. level and you actually see the material benefit from it instead of this more broad. We need to campaign against X thing and it's just hard to see any results and then people lose morale or like, why are we doing this? Or you get into like black pill territory and stuff. And I think that it is good to have people within those movements who can contextualize and who can connect the dots and do that kind of more theoretical or meta work as well.

But it has to be a dialectic. You can't have the intellectual people talking about that stuff in the absence of an actual movement for concrete material gains. And I think this is kind of the Bolshevik argument. You can't have the concrete material gains on their own without some kind of larger political project. That's kind of the... Praxis baby. Yeah. And I mean, that's what the unions, a lot of unions have essentially accepted that model, right?

that they'll take concrete material improvements in wages or benefits or whatever, but they won't link it to a political project. And then therefore, it just defangs the whole process. This got me thinking about some of the work I've been doing with the abolitionist library association and just getting goals straightened out and how do you explain these things simply and how do you do agitation? Because we just have this whole conversation to kind of work out the problem with the intellectual freedom absolutism. And I think maybe one of the things going forward is finding a way to make this concrete for people and make them see. No, this is not actually common sense.

This is something masquerading as such. And it will in some way affect you. Like someday you will not be the person with the common sense or something like that. I mean, we don't have to figure it out today. we're wrapping up anyway. But if anyone else has any ideas or slogans, chance and wants to make a sign, I think they should do that.

Please, no steppy. Yeah, no steppy. We went this whole episode and I couldn't figure out a point to you. I was so ready to use this drop and I couldn't use it. Gender? What is this? Soviet Russia? Gender, hardly know her.

That's what we should end on. Okay. That's Sam's new catchphrase. Yeah, that was Sam talking just now. Perfect. Yeah. Is it a great, perfect Daffy Duck impression. Thanks for coming on again.

Sam, did you want to plug anything? And otherwise, we'll have your Twitter info, everything, and all the articles that are referring to all your blog posts. I have nothing to plug. I have no sound filed. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming back on. You're not going to advertise galaxy lights in the reply to to the tweet. You have to get paid to that. You're doing this backwards, Jay. They have to offer you money first. Okay. Well, good night.