librarypunk - 147 - Patmos Public Library with Josh from TWOAPW

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

We’re talking with Josh from TWOAPW about Patmos Public Library, his personal connections to it, and the issues around public library funding and censorship of LGTBQ materials.  https://www.worstpossible.world/  https://www.twitch.tv/traditional_scrench  TWOAPW Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:kp7xkxfutoinhqeg3sfswghd Media Mentioned Segment: https://www.kcrg.com/2025/02/25/bill-ban-obscene-material-iowa-libraries-advances/  Why it’s called the Patmos library: https://hudsedfound.org/what-we-do/engage-alumni/marvinandjunepatmos.html  Whose Children Are They: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18559276/  Reporting from the time of the initial removal vote:  https://www.metrotimes.com/news/conservative-michigan-town-defunds-library-over-lgbtq-book-30736450 https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/upset-over-lgbtq-books-michigan-town-defunds-its-library-tax-vote  https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/politics/jamestown-township-library-close-failed-millage-lgbtq/69-021f241b-611c-4856-bd7f-0994f967e714 Go Fund Me set up: https://www.gofundme.com/f/fund-patmos-library-for-2023 Reporting on the failure of the second vote: https://www.mlive.com/politics/2022/11/patmos-library-millage-fails-again-following-controversy-over-lgbtq-books.html MLA statement after second vote: https://www.milibraries.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1375:statement-on-patmos-library-millage---news---michigan-library-association&catid=44:news-advocacy&Itemid=311 Funding approved:  https://lanthorn.com/101674/news/allendale/jamestown-library-funding-approved-after-multi-year-content-disagreements/ https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/politics/michigan-politics/millage-vote-fund-jamestown-township-patmos-library-fails-ottawa-county/69-8102ff6f-1944-4246-a967-c2b3dc3a119e  MLive documentary on banning books in Michigan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x043zuGWgMA Another Michigan library: https://bookriot.com/alpena-public-library/  Porn hunters in Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6656855  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG  Transcripts: https://pastecode.io/s/ybvo6u1t 

Who's this little lobster guy that's on your microphone? This is my little friend. Okay. He hangs out on the streams that I do because I stream a couple times a week. Okay. His name is White Santa. The reason that he's named White Santa is that I made the mistake of asking Chat to name him when we were in the middle of a discussion about Megan Kelly. And they said, name him White Santa.

And the name stuck very quickly. All right. But it's also, I mean, he's just a cute little guy. He's just a cute little guy. I love him. You can't be talking like that white Santa. You can't be talking about that white Santa. That's exactly right.

And that's me at most times. You'd be surprised at how racist this kid is. It's really right. Yeah, it's traditional scrunch now, but I think I was early. I think I might still have like the first little tier thing that they give you. Oh, like a early subscriber. Oh, like from Trash Future like way back in the day. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny now because there's actually nobody even on the stream anymore who is part of Trach Future. because now November's not really on it anymore. Me and Jay are big fans of Worstful Possible Worlds. Oh, yeah. He quizzes me on factoid's from the show. So when you did the, what was it, the Sweetie Todd episode?

Oh, yeah, that was a good one. Because Tinder subject, we did one as well. Oh, cool. Yeah. So, you remember on the Worst of Possible Worlds when they were mentioning during that presentation? Oh, like, no, I'd, let's make sure that my soundboards work in. Mmm, so good and tasty.

There we go. One day I will kill him over the soundboard, but maybe not today. It is good. See, you've encouraged me, someone who appreciates my soundboard, and I'm using it little crazy. I mean, I would be a hypocrite if I were to discourage people from using a soundboard, given how our show operates. Like every so often, I'll just be chilling, and Brian will hit me with a he-what, and then that's just, you know. I need to get that one. Behold, the atheist's nightmare.

Yeah, all three of us grew up some flavor of like evangelical or other weirdo Christian. Where are you all from? I'm from Southern Illinois, so right in the Bible Belt originally. Yep. Yep, I'm from Florida. So I grew up Southern Baptist. Okay. The fun ones that split off for the good reasons.

I'm in Western Washington, Seattle area. Okay. I was raised Mormon. Oh, hell yeah. Okay, cool. My entire exposure to Mormonism is basically through my friends who live in Utah. I used to live in Salt Lake City, yeah. Okay, yeah.

As well as, of course, the classic movie musical Saturdays Warrior, which is... Have you seen Saturdays Warrior? My dad used to watch it every Saturday. Yes. This is great. We're learning new Sadie lore. These are they on Saturday. That is such a bad musical and so many of the songs are so good.

Like, better than they have any right to me. All right. We'll get started. Go. Oops. Fade out too soon. I switched the soundboards, so I had more of my stuff. And I didn't realize I was going to shut the sound off.

Leave it. Technical difficulties. All right. I'm Justin. I'm a free agent. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them?

I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian, and my pronouns are he-him. And we have a guest, which would like to introduce yourself. Yes, hello. My name's Josh. I am the son and grandson of librarians, though I am a lot of librarian myself. I use he-him pronouns. Nailed it. Yes. You did it. You get a gold star. Thank you for your support. That's right, boys. Mundo. Oh, no, he's going to be on one.

I'm really excited. I'm getting the feeling I've made a terrible, terrible mistake. Yes. No, no. This is good. People love this. Nice. I'm the podcast's favorite.

Sure. Okay. Well, we are going to talk about the Patmos Public Library. But first, I have news. So, in Iowa, there is a bill to ban obscene materials and libraries, public libraries, because they told us this is limited to school libraries because those are forced on students. This is not about your public library collections. And so the Iowa Senate's subcommittee passed SF-235 Tuesday morning. It would eliminate an exemption to obscenity laws that

protects public libraries across the state. It allows citizens to raise objections and even file lawsuits against libraries. So once again, the Texas bounty laws rear their head and move to another state. So yeah, that's what's happening there. Shit's bad. If you live in Iowa, write to your representatives immediately. Buy gun. You can do that in Iowa. Haven't said it in 10 episodes or so. So we're back to form. I don't have a job. I can't get yelled at for getting my Twitter deleted at work.

True story. Somehow. It's right. I don't talk about anything I do on social media at work, but I must have mentioned it once two years ago and then got called in for a meeting about it. So yeah, it's funny because when I was talking to Josh to get the episode idea, he was like, do you know about the Patmos Public Library? I was like, I don't know, maybe. And it was like, the library director quit.

And I was like, you're going to have to be more specific. A lot more specific than that, yeah. You got really narrow it down there, buddy. No, this was kind of the OG like, banned library controversy because of the way that they had the millage, they failed to pass the millage renewal, that ended up shutting down the library. And this was one of the first ones that made the news in a national way, especially because it's a connection to the book, genderqueer and all that sort of thing. Yeah, I have had a Google Alert running for a while

now. And so I just constantly have a stream of news coming into my inbox. That's like, book fight here, this county library, this city library. all over the country. I mean, this is the thing I've said many times before, and I'm sure we're not going to stop. But like, you're not safe in Massachusetts. You're not safe in New York City. These things are happening everywhere. So you're not as far from Texas as you think. Everyone in Massachusetts who looks at my Texas ID and goes, oh, Texas. That was news. Is that the typical voice that people normally make when you talk about Texas? They go, huh, Texas. Yeah. Or every time I'm like, my boyfriend lives in Texas. they're like, oh, and I'm like, I...

They really do. They have like such a visceral reaction. Like, I go to the weed store and I show my ID to get into the weed store. And they're like, oh, the scanner's not working. It must be because it's a Texas ID. Or we were, remember we were at the, we were at the Sam Adams Brewery. And they said, who's traveled the furthest to be here tonight? And I won.

Because I was, he's like, unfortunately has to go to the guy from Texas. I was like, what the fuck? I'm not Greg Abbott, get off my dick. So I don't know what Texas did to you, but. I've never actually been to Texas. Is it, is it, do you recommend? Not if you're trans, no. Okay.

What about just like in general, like if you're not trans or? I live in a very interesting part of Texas, so I live right on the border. And so it's very culturally distinct from the rest of Texas. Texas is basically like three or four states. So I would say like, you know, West Texas is one state, sort of the hill country where Austin is is another state. The Cajun side on the east part is another state. And then the valley is its own thing. And yeah, it's a fascinating place.

to live if you're not from here because people, ever since I moved here, I've been like, why'd you move here? Why would anyone move here? People move away from here, right? So it's, I would highly recommend visiting the Valley because people here are really nice. And everyone's like, oh, when I moved to people like, oh, you know, it is one of the

solidly blue places in Texas. So, you know, that'll be great. And like, no, they're just as conservative. It's just that the Republicans don't care about this area until recently. And then they at the moment they started paying attention, they started winning. So, well, that's definitely a commonality between, I think, Texas and the great state of Michigan, which Michigan is really three states in one, maybe four if you can, like the thumb is also sort of its own thing. But yeah, you've got West Michigan, Eastern Michigan, and then everything from like the tip of the mitten up through the UP. For all intents and purposes, those are basically three different states that all happen to share a government. Yeah, many such cases. I mean, I grew up in Florida, so I'm used to like big crazy states. So it's, you know, Miami's its own thing.

Tampa is its own thing. The north of Florida is basically just Georgia. It's, you know, the thing, it's so interesting because you can drive through it and you're like, oh, I'm seeing the Georgia billboards. So it's like, my heart's beating at 10 seconds after conception and Jesus loves you. And you start seeing those. I mean, he does. He loves you a lot. I love the ones that are just like, remember Jesus.

I'm like, I too remember Jesus. Whatever happened to that guy? Where to go? Long time no see. It doesn't drop an album in a while. Main stage of the Grammy Awards. Folks, he's back. You might remember him.

He's our Lord and Savior. Best known for dying on the cross, roughly 1,980 years ago. Folks, give it up. Give it up for Jesus Christ. Back here on the track. Rome thought they had him beat. I'm turning my chair around. I'm turning my hat and my chair around.

I'm straddling the chair and I'm saying, guys, you know who else gets knocked down and he gets up again. You're never going to keep them down. Jumbawamba, yeah. You know, I'm, I guess I should just sort of clear a few things up top here too. You know, I'm excited to be on here to talk about library shit because even though, as I said, I am not a librarian myself, it is, it has always been something that's been a part of my upbringing. You know, my mom is a children's librarian. I grew up reading books. I grew up going to the library. Some of my best friends, because I was a weird little, you know, shrimp-y kids. Some of my best friends were the librarians at my local public library. So

this sort of thing really matters to me. And so with the story of the Jamestown Library specifically, it's one of those things that runs up against both my sort of cultural, I guess, milieu, what I grew up with, as well as the political landscape that I care about a great deal, that I also talk about a fair bit on my own podcast. And so I'm excited to kind of get into it and talk a little bit about this sort of individual case study in a library in a small conservative community and why I think it matters, not just as an individual example, but also as one emblematic form of a battle that is happening all over the country. Yeah. And why don't you go ahead and tell us your back, you know, a little bit of background about Ottawa County? Sure. Well, so this library

that we're going to be talking about today is called the Patmas Public Library. Just want to clear that up. That's the pronunciation. I've heard a lot of different pronunciations. They are all incorrect. The correct pronunciation for this thing is Patmos. And it is located in a county called Ottawa, the county of Ottawa in the state of Michigan. And basically, that county was settled by these ultra-conservative Dutch Protestants beginning in the mid-1800s. And so the whole reason it's called Ottawa County is that those, of course, are the people who were displaced. There are still some Ottawa people who live in and around the area.

But yeah, that was the land that got expropriated. Those were the people who was expropriated from. And Ottawa County is, I would say, the really the beating heart of Republican politics in West Michigan. When it comes to your standard issue, Republican freak, right, they probably, if they're in Michigan, they're probably either from that area or they are connected to people who are. That is where the power center is.

It's the DeVos political machine. Betsy DeVos, she came up out of there. She cut her teeth there. She's probably the best known example of the type of guy who emerges from Ottawa account. So we can like solidly blame the Dutch for this is what you're saying. Hoondopee, yes. I mean, it is pretty much the entire communities that settled there originally were all these ultra-hardcore Dutch Protestants who wanted to set up their own basically ethnic enclave in Michigan.

And successfully did so. And so the politics of the area are all drawn along those lines. Ottawa County went 59% Trump in the most recent election. But Jamestown specifically, which is the township that we're going to be talking about today, it is basically a subdivision of that county. They're called townships in Michigan if they're unincorporated land and not like an actual city proper. James Town is in the southeast corner of Ottawa County. And the township went 75% Trump in the local. in the last election.

And if you look back at the past few elections, that's pretty much been the margin is around a 50% margin. So it should give you a good sense of kind of what this place is. Up yours, woke moralists. We'll see who cancels who. You're goddamn right, Jordan. They did say that. Available for kissing practice on a portable Nintendo.

Justin, how many fucking Kermit fuckhead sound drops do you have? Do not play them all that I ask for a count. I think that's just us, too. Okay. I have to start supervising the soundboard. It's like I'm cutting you off. If we had a dedicated soundboard person, I would be okay with that. Just someone just to come in and hit the ham horn every once in a while.

Justin, stop. We keep on track. I've barely been using the soundboard. I don't know why you're complaining now. So you have a little thing here about cultural conservatism in Michigan and how it's a little different from other parts of the county. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's worth noting that there are some commonalities about cultural conservatism no matter where you are. The fear of the outside world is kind of the big thing. And that's the whole reason that these people settled down in Michigan in the first place was they wanted a place where they could be cloistered from the pernicious influence of the other people in the Netherlands who were,

coming, I guess, too liberal or whatever. But there's also a really strong tradition of, I wouldn't call it intellectual curiosity exactly, but it's this idea that like we need to have records of everything. Those records need to be well maintained and people need to be able to have access to those records, which again, I just chalk up to kind of being Dutch. Like that's a big, that's a big piece of what it is to be Dutch. But that's the one thing about all of this that makes it a little bit different. And that's why, you know, it's like, well, why is there, they're this really strong tradition of, like, really good public libraries in these very conservative parts of the state?

And in West Michigan in particular, the answer is, well, because they're Dutch, genuinely. And this is also where I should note that I grew up in Kent County, which is the next county over from Ottawa. And I actually spent much of my childhood in Ottawa County, specifically along the lake there, Lake Michigan. And this is the part where I reveal that the Patmos Library, the reason I can pronounce Patmos so well, is that it is the name of my great uncle, Marv, who endowed the township with $1 million to build a new library back in the year 2000. So, I know. So when I heard that, you know, this was happening not just near my hometown, because I grew up

in Grand Rapids, but also was specifically affecting, I would be, it would be an exaggeration say like my family's legacy, but, but it is something that is directly personally connected to me because a little bit about Marv, basically his whole deal was he never got past the eighth grade, but he was able to learn a lot by reading. And so he was like, well, other people should be able to do that too. And that's why he endowed the library. Yeah, many such cases. I wonder also if, because I did see in the various news, like local news stories I was reading, they also talked a little bit about like the racial makeup of the areas. And I do wonder if like the history of segregates, and the sort of cultural, what's the word, homogeneity,

kind of meant that, you know, Brown v. Board and other desegregation things didn't affect them as much because, you know, at different times, you could have different levels and be like, well, you know, that was an issue for us. And so, you know, like I mentioned being Southern Baptist, like, you know, that's where all the white citizens councils went after the 1950s.

So they were like, don't add the University of Tampa to the public, don't make it a public university because then it will have to integrate. So that's why they built a university of South Florida down the road because they were going to use public funds to build it. So that was why. And that was in the, I think, 30-year history of the university that they put out, but they had to take that out. Okay. But the historians who wrote it left it in a footnote because historians are really funny like that. In the case of the Jamestown Township Library specifically, it was just built as a standard issue public library in 19,

So it's been a public library for its entire existence. The donation was basically just so they could build a bigger building. Yeah. To the point of like, I guess, the cultural homogeneity or lack thereof, it is fair to say that that part of Michigan is almost exclusively white and specifically ethnically Dutch. When you get into the bigger cities, specifically Grand Rapids, there's a fair bit more diversity, but I would say that historically, these are communities that were extremely homogene. Yeah, and I think a lot of people take that for granted when they look at the history of their area and go,

well, it didn't really happen here. It's like, yeah, there's reasons. So the initial complaints about this, about Patmos was over genderqueer. This was, I think, probably several months before the millage vote. It was removed from the shelves and put behind the counter. And, Since they had went ahead and capitulated, opponents formed a group, the Jamestown Conservatives, who suggested the library was grooming children. You know, groomer was real big. It was the new gritty, and everyone was hitting it. And they were saying, yeah.

And so they said, let's vote against the millage. And there were only 90 books of the library's 67,000 books that had LGBTQ themes. And about 30% of the townships, residents turned out to vote. vote, which is the millage covers 84% of the library's $245,000 budget. Some of the other books that they were complaining about was spinning, a graphic novel about a teen girl, and her attraction to other girls, and Kiss Number 8. I actually haven't heard these come up in the book band news as often, so I figured I'd go ahead and mention those.

This also reminds me, like, this is like so retro almost. This reminds me of in John Waters or John Waters, this sort of like stand-up lecture, this filthy world that he gives. He talks about when he was younger, all the dirty books he wanted to read were always behind the counter. And they said, C librarian in order to read them. And he would go steal those books. And I'm like, gone or the Halcyon days, or you could find the naughty books in the C librarian section. Like, I just feel so retro. It's so stupid. I think it's also worth noting in terms of like the millage itself that because Jamestown is a township and not a city, taxes are very low there. And the millage itself is not a meaningful tax. You know, we're talking about like $200,000-ish split across maybe 10,000 people. But it's not not anything. And this is a hardcore anti-tax kind of area. So I think that does play into it as well. Yeah. And I mean, speaking of old school, when I was going through a lot of local stories, I saw like the, and I really have to hand it to,

What is the site? Bridge, Michigan, BridgeMI.com. Bridge is a really, really good publication for local progressive news. Yeah, a lot of their articles go into way more depth than you expect they're going to, because they're like, here's the millage count, and here's what happened, here's the background. It's really thorough stuff. And one of their articles was sort of like a roundup of other things across the state. So other places in Michigan were saying, like, you know, we need to ban Harry Potter. 2022, like she's on your side, right?

You don't really hear that anymore. Like, so it's like, we need to get rid of the queer books and a jigsaw puzzle of the Women's March in 2020. There were too many books written by Jewish people was one of the complaints. I mean, talk. We're hitting the, we're hitting classics. And so it was a really nice roundup of like some of the complaints that people were coming in. And the thing that kind of stood out to me was the voters who were organizing this campaign didn't

expect they would win. At least the rank and file ones were like, you know, I just wanted to send a message. I just wanted to let my voice be heard because they're not doing the thing that I'm saying, which is get rid of the 90 books out of these 67,000 books. So therefore, I need to show up and vote no. And put a giant sign in my yard that says, hang on. Let me get the exact word. Yeah, no, I've got it right here. It's a great sign. 50% millage increase. And that's all caps in red to groom. That's also all caps. it's much larger font. Our kids vote. Lowercase. Vote no on library. Exactly. Vote no on library is very funny to me.

It has the feeling of look at banner, Michael, from Arrested Development. You know you've got a winning campaign when you're like, vote no on de library. On library. On library. There's no like, like, and this is like, okay, so to everyone who makes goofy, few little protest signs so that you'll get on Instagram or whatever when you go to a march. Stop that shit. Make concrete demands.

And they're not even doing it, right? Because they don't have the number of the proposition or whatever. You got to give people specifics. Vote no one. Number eight. Boom. Solid. Too many words. Anytime you see anything about a library anywhere, you need to vote against it.

That's the rule. Yep. So, yeah, we've talked about millage votes before in the past in some of the contentious fights that tend to accompany them. And it's usually stuff like the library is not doing the thing I want to. So we're going to argue about the millage vote and threaten to torpedo it. And yeah, so you get a lot of that. Now, Josh, do you have any ideas if book bans or challenges?

Like, I'm assuming they happened at this library before. But do you know, like, were it different, was it different kinds of books or coming from different people before then? Like usually challenges happen at schools, but I didn't know if you knew. I don't know specifically in this case. I do know that there are this, this came off the back of a lot of other action going on nationally, particularly like right after the acute period of the pandemic. There was that period of time where the schools were still not open and it was like, open the schools. That agitation ended up being a very effective form of organizing for. the reactionary, right? Obviously, Moms for Liberty, groups like that. And this particular

situation, I don't know if it was fearheaded by Moms for Liberty, but it was groups like that that were providing a lot of the ammunition in terms of going out there and making the message. They were definitely getting assistance from that sort of grassroots, quote unquote, but really astroturfing type organizations. Because highly astroturfed. If you, look at the rhetoric that was being used, it all aligns with the Moms for Liberty playbook. But like I said, I don't know, I can take a look and see if there's actually an explicit connection there. But if you look at the videos of like the people at the town halls and shit, it's all the same talking points. Yeah, we did an episode on on Moms for Liberty and I really dived into their connections. And essentially, you can ultimately

categorize them as an extension of the DeSantis campaign because remember how we fucked up his campaign filings and couldn't spend his money. So that's where a lot of this money went was to funding other groups like Moms for Liberty. And they have a project called Moms for Libraries. This also connects to some book grifts. So Brave Books, which I believe is what's the left behind guy? Oh, what is his fucking name? The guy who wrote it or Kirk Cameron?

Kirk Cameron. A lot of our show. Friend of the worst of all possible world is Kirk Cameron. Yeah. I love the Left Behind movies. They're so bad. Yeah, he was involved in that. And then there were some other stuff that all kind of came together into this kind of ball of anti-library stuff.

So were you showing us, Arthur? Yeah, look how cute he's being on my body pillow. He's sitting like a little guy. There's a cat over on the pillow. This is an audio on the medium, but we're looking at a very cute cat. Yeah, library punk heads know King Arthur. and how cute he is. Yeah, so that's a lot of where

Mom's for Liberty comes from. I did a real deep dive. I started typing out names and how they're all connected. A lot of them are like Sarasota, Republicans. The husband of the lady who is one of the founders of Mom's for Liberty is a Republican campaigner for the state Republican Party.

So, you know, all of this is really Florida and it's all highly astro-turf. They say they have a lot of members. What they mean is people who have bought T-shirts from them or have asked them for like talking points and placards, that's their membership, because it's free to be a member. And they also say they make all their money from t-shirt sales, which is impossible. It's not, it's too much money. Worth noting also that we on our show talked about a few years ago now, a show called, or

documentary, rather, documentary and heavy air quotes called Whose Children Are They? And this was one of many examples of propaganda that is intended to make people agitated against teachers, but in a way where they think they actually love their teachers, so much of this actually ends up being anti-union propaganda, though, at the end of the day, which is really interesting. The culture war side of things is tied right in with a strong, strong distaste for the power of the public sector. And a fair bit of this culture war is just really craven. politicking where reactionary conservative operatives are finding ways to put in a wedge around fears of things like gender and sexuality to drive a campaign to deunionize schools and expel, of course,

librarians and stuff like that, which I'm sure you all know very much about. I'm just pointing it up for the sake of making the connection that this is as much an anti-labor thing as it is an anti-culture thing. Because most of the time when people say that they love their libraries and everything, oh, we love the library. The library is great. They don't give a shit about the people who work there. Right. It is like, it is so often, like, especially this is true in academic libraries a lot, when some entitled faculty member learns that you're getting rid of their special journal that is their baby that they've been published in twice, but nobody else has ever. And you tell them like, well, we can't afford it in the budget because the state won't give us more. And we can't get more money and these get more expensive. And they're like, well, then why do we need you? Yeah. What do you do? We have Google.

Like, like, in academic libraries, some faculty would rather just have their journal subscriptions than have people working there. This is why this is an anti-Little Free Library podcast, by the way, because those things obfuscate what libraries actually are and that libraries are about labor and not about fucking books. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Plus, it's a company and you have to register with it. And they just call the cops on black people who use them.

Yeah. Well, and that's why these political signs like vote no on library also just work, right? It's library as an entity and not library workers, right? But on the flip side, one of the library systems I used to work at, when we went out for a levy for the first time in like a decade or more, they actually really pushed the library worker angle. Like these are the things that the people who work at your library who live in your community are going to get like raises and all of this stuff. And it worked. So yeah, it's like an interesting thing to see like, oh yeah, vote no on library. What library? What vote, you know, the entity that is the public library. I love the entity. You know, that's the public library. And then it takes a lot of effort to get people to, yeah, see the actual workers who are running the library. And that it's prevalent in public libraries. too. Now, people think all librarians are either like us, right, where we're a bunch of leftist troublemakers, or they view them as like quirky progressives who wear lots of cardigans and all that. Like, usually people, that's who a librarian is to people. I do love a cardigan. I do love a cardigan. I've been cardigan pill. But like not all librarians are, quote, progressive, right? It's like how you get nurses who are very anti-science and everything, right?

So, like, in this area, where at Patmos, did I say it right? Patmos? You did. Patmas. Yeah, Patmas. The tea is almost silent. Patmas. Yeah, it's like, you know, like Benton is where I grew up. Yeah, yeah, that's where I grew up. So, yeah, just swallow it. But yeah, are the librarians at Patmos, where do they fall on this? Like the actual library workers who are receiving these challenges and have to deal with them. Like, are they like, yeah, we agree. These books are bad? Or are they like not?

So they're kind of, from what I can tell, they sort of fall into the space where they're not really, they're not radical lefties, but they're also not like reactionary freaks, right? These are just people who care about helping kids read at the end of the day, which is, which is, I think that's, that's to me, the common thing about, like, most libraries. genuinely, it's that. It's just like, we want to help people get the resources that they want. Like, that's the point of being a librarian. And I know that it wore very, very heavily on the people who were involved with this library to just have all of this ideological vitriol thrown at them. Because these are not, like, deeply ideological people beyond just having a commitment to literacy.

Yeah. So library director, Amber McLean resigned, I think, prior to the vote in the spring of 22. saying that she'd been harassed online and accused of indoctrating children, and then interim director Matthew Lawrence resigned later. So their interim also left. I've also been accused of those things. I, from what I was reading, many people who were speaking up in favor of the library, because the library and their board, to the board's credit,

this wasn't one of the situations where the board were the bad guys, although there was clearly a member on the board who was against it, but they weren't very vocal. They just had like a sign in their yard. and then couldn't be reached for comment. But the board said, no, there's a challenge process. We have a collection development policy. We're following it.

And there's a challenge process, and we're following that. And that is all kosher with the state laws. That is, you know, First Amendment is we have a right to a challenge policy. We have a right to have these in the library. There is First Amendment law on this stuff. This is how we're going to run the library. They just want to run the library properly. And that's the radical left.

agenda is running the law in accordance with the way it's supposed to be run. Well, and something that I should note about Ammer McLean as well is that she is a gay woman, which, again, in the eyes of these people will make you a radical, radical ideologue just by virtue of your identity. She's not the groomer because she's gay. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. So the deck was kind of stacked against her from the beginning. Yeah, no, I saw a couple of news articles about like,

trans, the very few trans library directors that there have been out there who have been resigning because of either of their own volition or because the library board was like, you should probably resign. Well, in this particular case, the reason she resigned, and this is just an article from the Michigan advance, apparently somebody came into the library in March of 2022 and said she was looking for the person she called, quote, that pedophile librarian, and, quote, And that's when all your library workers pull in, I am Spartacus, and they all start doing that, is what you do in that situation. Yeah, it also mentioned how, like, at the time of the millage vote, there was, like, a big display of, like, classics, never out of print, and it had, like, the Bible and Einrand on it.

And it's like, you know, it's a conservative town library. Like, I don't know what they're really upset about. So the initial vote, voters rejected the millage by 62% to 37%. Total turnout was 3,000 people. And this happened in August. So this meant that they could go up for a millage ballot effort for three months from then, from what I understand. I'm trying to make sure that I'm not getting wrong. No, that's correct.

So that was on the ballot at the same time as the general election in 2022. So, yeah, standard November ballot. Same, that's the same ballot that all of the congressional shit was on. Okay. So, yeah, many of people who said they voted to defund the library said they didn't believe it would close. They just wanted to see a message. I remember that. I remember that.

That was the thing that drove me up the wall was like, what did you think would happen? Just surprise Pikachu? Like, yep. Real, yeah, leopard's eating face party going on there. Brexit energy. So yeah, I mean, obviously people got a little stir crazy in COVID and decided to organize around this and they organized successfully to reject the millage. So they had a second vote.

Well, after the initial vote, there was also a statement from the Michigan Library Association, which pointed out, you know, there was basically about five challenged books in total out of 90 books. It's less than 0.01% of libraries collection. And they started getting international attention for this and people were giving donations to a go fund me from all across the world, you know. So this made the news. Something that I also wanted to note about this is that it's pretty remarkable, actually,

that they were able to get this campaign together because generally speaking, when it comes to these campaigns in favor of book bannings, it's a very small handful of people, a very, very small handful of people. I'm sure y'all have talked about this before. The people who are lodging these complaints, it's literally like 10 people. And sometimes they aren't even from their district. Like part of like the whole mom's for libraries, Monstre Liberty campaign is like these like literally boilerplate like templates of like here's

the email you send. Here's what you do. Find every public library you can. So some libraries now to sort of weaponize like whole like whole up against these have started putting like rules around like who can submit book challenges. If a book is challenged and we decide to keep it, you can't submit. another challenge to it. You have to provide your library card number, like all of this stuff because of this

astroturfing that's happening. And I mean, I saw a talk that Maya Kobab gave, actually, the author of Gender Queer talking about this stuff. Yeah. And that was a little bit after the whole thing had come and gone. But I think it was before they successfully refunded the library. Yeah, it was. It was right after the initial defunding, I think.

Well, maybe not that exact talk. but I know that that was in the news soon after was authors were standing up for this particular library. It was, you know, when you said like the director quit, you know, I've also seen footage of like library board meetings where, you know, the library director will give a speech right before they're about to have a vote on firing them. And then we'll give this speech, it'll be on tape, and then they'll leave the room for the vote. And then the board will go ahead and vote to fire them anyway. So it is very hard to tell these cases apart because they happen way more often than you think. And the local news is kind of always a little surprised. It kind of always has it, oh, it's come to, it's come to Grand Rapids.

Oh, it's come to Kennesaw. Oh, it's come to West Massachusetts. It's come to Canada, you know. And I'm a little annoyed at Canadians this past like month because some person kind of had their brain broke a little bit by the tariffs. And so there were someone I was following on blue sky, and they just suddenly went like full Canadian nationalist. And I was like, that's not the right reaction to this. Just do an infinite jest and become a wheelchair, Quebec qua terrorist, is all I'm going to say. Like, we're in the infinite jest timeline now.

Like, shit's going to get crazy. This is the year of the Depends adult undergarment, yes. Exactly. Thank you. Someone understands my annoying infinite jest jokes. Always. I encourage him. No, so like with them being surprised.

that like, oh, it worked. Like, so much, so like all of us growing up in churches, we know that this has been the game plan for decades. Like, in a very material, political way, we are not surprised by this because we went to church and heard this shit when we were kids.

Like, nothing has changed. It's just becoming true now. But I feel like most people who are voting on this who maybe aren't in those, like, evangelical hotbeds or whatever, So much of it is just aesthetic to them. They don't think through the materialism of it.

Or if they do, it's not going to affect them. So that when it does happen and it starts affecting them, they just don't know how to process that because Aaron Sorkin should be put in the hague for the West Wing because everyone think that that's how politics works, right? Aaron Sorkin, Aaron Sorkin should be putting the hag for the news. Actually, Aaron Sorkin should be putting the hag for the West Wing and then executed for the newsroom.

But that's neither here nor there. Yeah, exactly. I think that when it comes to the evangelical approach to all of this, the other thing that is worth noting is that the evangelical, the standard is kind of evangelical way of seeing the world cannot understand what it would be like to live life outside of the loving arms of the church. Right. And so this is the thing that a lot of people have.

difficulty understanding, I find, is they'll be like, wait, but why can't they just be okay with other people living their lives the way that they want to live them and then keep their very doctrinaire, prescriptive worldview sequestered to their own lives? And the answer is they don't think that that boundary exists. Genuinely, it is not something that conceptually makes sense to them. Yeah. And the politicization of evangelicals was, again, a reaction to Civil Rights Act. The sort of mod, I mean, evangelicals have always kind of been certain types of voting blocks, not always in bad ways, but particularly post-civil rights era. Again, all those white citizens councils just moved straight into the Southern Baptist churches.

I remember some lady getting up after Obama was elected and going, we need. This is like 90 million-year-old woman, because this is Florida and a church. So, you know, this woman's like 10 years older than God. And she was like, we need to take our country back. And I was like, okay, where to go? Like, we're still in, we're still in Pasco County, Florida. Like, we are, the Pascoe County once in a while gets in the news for like spying on kids to, to pre-screen them for jail and buying suicide drones or whatever for, for this rural-ass

county in Florida. I mean, like, you're fine. But yeah, the politicization is people don't really understand that this has all been well organized and this has always been the plan. Go get on your library board. go to the meetings, vote and shit, bank public opinions, harass people at their cars after. Get shit done. Yeah, we did have people on not that long ago with Wright Dad talking about the particular defunding of a library.

But that was particularly more worker focus. That was, you know, they were really trying to discipline their workforce. So the second vote went nowhere. It still failed by 56% voted against, and total turnout was 5,400. So it was a higher turnout. Which makes sense, because it was a congressional election year in the general election in November. So, yeah. So the third vote, much lower turnout because it's not a congressional election year. So the vote is a total turnout of 2,500. It does pass. But one of the reasons that it passes is because the library will be, put stickers on the cover, cover pages of controversial books. This is shit we talked about in like cataloging 101, the labeling of books, and is it good or not?

And usually the ethics questions that we would get are for a creationism book. How do you classify that? Do you put that in the nonfiction section or in the fiction section? like do you go by what it claims to be or what you believe it to be or for like memoirs that are then revealed to be a total piece of crap, you know, fabricated? What do you do with those? Like labeling books like this is kind of incredibly antithetical to library and ethics as they currently stand because they're making a judgment call about the book. Like there's a difference between like a librarian and or a publisher being like, here's the age appropriateness for this book, because this is very common with like, as I'm sure your mom knows, like grade school level, there's like age five to whatever, this to whatever, because it's often like reading levels. Right. Right. And that's important to know, especially if you're a parent, you need to be able to go in the catalog and filter it for just that

age group because your kid doesn't know this word yet, right? So like that, that's fine. That's not like a controversial type of labeling. And libraries have explicit materials. Like, romance novels are a thing that are in libraries, and they're just in a specific section, like, kind of a lot of libraries are going towards the more like genre model like bookstores are sometimes, whether it's like, oh, here's the fiction, but here's like the mystery and thriller, and here's the romance or whatever within fiction. That's also fine and not controversial.

This is controversial because you're making a judgment. call about it, but also where does this stop? Right. This is one reason I have an issue with the harmful language statements that libraries do. I know they're coming from a good place and some of them are done very well, but who gets to decide what causes harm and to whom? And who are they making that decision for? I completely agree.

And this is something that, I mean, just for reference here, my world is the world of theater. That's what I do outside of my podcast. I make shows, I do theater. And it's a similar kind of situation where I'm like, if a playwright wants to say, hey, as a heads up, my play contains this,

that and the other thing, you should be aware. Obviously, that's fine. I'm not, I, you know, that I think it should be that way.

I think that there are accessibility questions about like, if I'm directing a production and it contains some flashing or like loud noises or whatever, I want people to be aware of that. That's something that. It's not, it's not like an ideological thing. It's just a, hey, you should know. And if this is too much for you, then it's probably a good thing that you're not seeing it, you know.

But then there's the other side of it, which is at what point do these content advisories or whatever just become a further way of cleaving acceptable information from unacceptable information? Yes. And that's something that scares me. And I think it happens a lot in theater, too, actually. I think that there are a lot of shows now. There is a tendency as well in theater. Very, you know, we love how liberal theater is. Oh, God.

This idea of like, what we need to protect people's sensibilities, but there are times at which that's probably not the approach that you want to take. There are times where it's good to be confrontational. There are times where I think it's important to surprise people and catch them off guard. And there's a way that you can do that where you're taking care of your audience. of course, taking care of your readers and all of the books that have been targeted for banning, I think,

do that very effectively. But yeah, at what point are you becoming the arbiter of what is and is not acceptable content? I'm actually going to be going on Friend of the Pod. Here be Media slash the left page. Next month to talk about the opera Don Giovanni

and staging of it like in a post Me Too world because so much opera is trying to do the reparative thing. And some has done it very well. Like Boston Lyric Opera just did a really good production of Madama Butterfly. Oh, interesting. That, like, took a couple of years of doing, like, focus group testing with, like, local Japanese-American, like, advocacy groups within Boston.

And you need serious dramaturgy to be able to pull something like that off, too. You need a dedicated dramaturg. You need dedicated creatives. Like, that takes a lot of work. And then they set it in internment camps. Okay. And said, like, that's how they changed the setting and everything. but they like worked with the local community around this.

And like I feel like that is actually a very successful example of the like, let's do something challenging but being reparative at the same time. Sometimes it's like, oh, let's, this thing is harmful and bad. Let's girl boss this up because it's misogynistic usually. And it completely misses the point that the original was trying to make first off. But then it just is somehow worse also. Or it's just like two gentlemen of Verona but woke. And it's like, but we don't need to do that play.

anymore. It just sucks. Sorry, Willie. You blew it with that one. Not your best one, Will. He was not bringing his best that time around. It was his first play. It has a lot of first play problems. And it's deeply, deeply misogynistic. But I'm off on a tangent about Shakespeare now. No, I love talking about Shakespeare. Especially when it comes to these like content warnings. Like, like I think Justin said earlier, like the Bible was also on display, right? So it's like, yeah. That's the most challenged book usually. Yeah, and it's like they don't even realize that their own bullshit can be targeted for this. So it's like, of course, you know, that whole liberal gotcha of, well, the Bible contains, you know, rape and whatever.

So let's put a content warning on that. Ha, ha. And I'm like, thank you, Aaron Sorkin. I was like, that's some Aaron Sorkin at shit right there. Yeah, it's like, I'm just like, it is not the gotcha that you think. It's actually just playing right into their, the way. that they think about this kind of stuff. So, like, that always irritates me when I see that argument when it comes to content warning.

It's like, show me a thousands-year-old book that doesn't have something, like, incredibly cringy about humanity in it. Like, go ahead. It's like to every, to people listening, listen to me right now, to every single one of you who win the executive order around trans people went out. And you went, oh, well, technically, it lists conception. we're all a fucking Zygote, so we're all nothing,

we're all women or whatever. You owe me $10. Just saying. Facts and logic didn't win your way through that one. Yeah, no. No, it's stupid. But I guess this is the other side of it, though, that I did want to talk about briefly

is that at the end of the day, a public library does have to comport to the community standards of a given community. And that's what makes this whole situation so difficult. Like, I open, by talking about the political composition of Jamestown, again, 75% Trump in some of the most annoying Christians you'll ever meet, because you're going to have to find a way to work within

the confines of that society, of that culture. And I don't like this solution, but at the same time, I do think that it's better than not having a public library. So I don't, I don't, I don't know how to square the circle on that one, genuinely. Yeah, and I mean, that's, I mean, one of the things which this particular library workers brought up was we need books that not only reflect our community, but also reflect the minorities in our community and also reflect the greater world because, and the great thing about a public library, too, is it's got that unforced force. It is, you know, and this is why it brings it back to public schools, because public schools, you are forced to learn about

things that you might not want to learn about. And it forces your children. There's a compulsion. You have to go to school and you have to learn about this stuff. There is a compulsive aspect to that. It forces you to broaden your worldview a little bit as much as K-12 does. But it's also why the public library argument isn't as strong because it's like, well, no one's forcing you to read these books. And in fact, when you say, well, we'll just make it easier for people to see, you know, you put a big yellow sticker on every queer book. Well, that causes a major problem because one, it segregates that part out of the collection, which is which is what it is, it also invades on the privacy of the reader because anyone can see that big

yellow sticker on the front of your book. And so anyone who goes to check out that book can then be bullied, can be given a side eye by a bad library assistant or a bad librarian who is going to be like, are you sure you want to read this? They exist. They're not great. But it is a direct violation of that person's privacy to read about what they want to read about and they're right to. And so, yeah, I think this solution is not a solution because all it did was segregate all the queer books in the library. Would rather have that than not have a library? Like, again, I agree with you, Josh, there. Like, it's better to have a library because this we can work with, right?

Like, this is something that can be temporary, right? What if someone just ripped all the stickers out? I was just about to say that. Like, what if that just conveniently feel out and nobody noticed it? I guess it depends on how the stickers. are affixed. If they're affixed directly to the page, that can be difficult to do without tearing out the whole page. Another sticker on the sticker. Yeah, no. Get your free Palestine stickers out. Put them on there. I would be very clear. I'm not saying that this is a good solution. I'm just thinking, like,

what are the ways then that you can take this and organize around it? Because I think that some people are going to see this as an acceptable compromise. And then if you can get them to that point, maybe there then is a way to continue forward from there. But I don't know what that looks like other than, yeah, being like, you know, these stickers are stupid, which they are, you know. I mean, one thing that they could do, and honestly, every single library in this country should be doing this if they haven't already been doing it or if they're doing it to do it more. whatever patron data you are holding onto in your integrated library system, which is a lot of it. Because sometimes it's helpful to know who the last person who checked out a book was

because it didn't get checked in properly. You can be like, hey, do you still have this? They go, no, I totally returned it. And then you go, okay, and you write it off. Like, sometimes it's helpful to have that information. But in our current climate, you just need to be scrubbing everything all of the time. so that even if someone does check out one of these, like, sequestered out pornographic queer books or whatever the fuck, like, then it's also not on their record after they return it so that if whomstever politicians come and ask for that,

or if there's some sort of warrant out for it, then it cannot, like, if you don't have that data, it can't be given away to hurt people. So you should at least also be doing that. I think that's a really good point that when it comes to just sort of, our reading habits in general. That's one of many things that will be subject to increased surveillance. That's how they got Kevin Spacey in seven. No lies. But was it how they got Kevin Spacey in real life? That's where I thought you were going with that because I forgot about seven. No, I bring up seven all the time on this fucking podcast. By the way, I did just want to note as well to the point of like what kind of community Jamestown is because I mentioned it a little bit earlier. But I went to the census. Bureau website. And it's, it's shockingly white, even by like standards of a place that's out in the

middle of nowhere. 88.3% white alone, 2.5% native, which again, those would probably mostly be Ottawa people. 4.6% Asian, 2.9% two or more races. 6.6% Hispanic or Latino. 5.5% black. So it's going to be hard to, I think the angle of we need to have things. for everybody in our community is true. The problem is when you're dealing with as homogenous of a community as this is, I think it's very easy for people to take sort of the majoritarian approach and be like, well, doesn't represent most of the community, so why should I care? And again, that's obviously there are various moral and ethical imperatives for that,

but it's like, well, how do you, I don't, I, this is the thing that I struggle with a lot, is when the appeal is always to the will of. the majority. And in this case, it's a majority in this area that is very much the minority more broadly. You're still able to set up your very small fiefdoms. That's why the Dutch Protestants did what they did in coming over from the Netherlands to Michigan. And I think that getting information out to everybody is important. The problem is that when you have people who will immediately shut down the possibility for that unless it's done on their terms, I don't know how you wrestle that back. I genuinely don't.

Unions, rank and file stuff, build power, good collection development policies. I don't know. This is why cities don't have public pools.

I mean, they lost that way. Public pools disappeared all over the country after integration. That just wasn't a winning thing. I was just talking with another podcast,

where a library, and what I said was, I think people have traditionally left libraries alone because of the reverence people have for books, a pseudo-religious reference that comes from Christianity. And because of that, they see libraries as pseudo-religious organizations and the state has much like with public universities,

left them alone. They'll give you the money. You can run it the way you want to. And the modern sort of, this ties into like the unitary executive theory of power is no, if we're paying money, we control you, we own you. You are not co-sovereign with the state. You will do it exactly how we tell you to do it because you're our employees. And so breaking down that co-sovereignty, the co-sovereignty that used to exist between church and state remains in some areas like higher education and libraries. And that is being eroded and that's bad. You know, it should be, they should be left to be more autonomous. And I think codifying that could be very good. That could be a good legislative fight to make sure that like, you know, the library will run based on its

directors and not based on the city council, not based on the governor, not based on, you know, it will, it will get funded and then it will be left alone. And that, you know, that might be a good legislative fight to take up in the future. I also think there's something to be said for that I think that there was a very specific cultural flashpoint regarding libraries and schools specifically that we're not quite there in the same way as we were a couple years ago, which isn't to say that it's not still there. It very much is. And I know you all have firsthand experience with that. But the like, Moms for Liberty stuff, they are not ascendant in the way that they were a few years ago. And there is that there is that thing of like the most, there's recency bias there where it's like

the most recent thing that you remembered is the thing that you need to care about. And then once the status quo settles down, sometimes you're able to push back and be like, well, now that this piece of it is settled, maybe we don't need the stickers anymore. But again, I don't know if that works. I'm just kind of spitballing here. Books do get worn out and replaced. So it's quite possible that within a decade, those stickered books will be seen as like, oh, it's got the yellow sticker on it. It's too old.

We need to get rid of it because, you know, when you're doing a weeding project, it's like, well, yeah, we used to do that a long time ago. Let's just get rid of the rest of them. And if there's high circulation for a couple, we'll get new copies. I also think a lot of this is just like following the like theory of reproductive futurism. Like this is when the Lee Edelman who lives in my head starts coming out because it's like so much of this is focused on the like hypothetical child capital C trademark, right, of like, okay, these beautiful little white babies that straight couples need to have in the future. And while we're pulling our children out of the public schools because they're a bunch of commies

who show them porn, so that's bad. So we do homeschooling, but the public library still exists. And to most people out there, when they think of a public library, they don't think of adults using it. They think of children using the public life. That's what the public library is for. Like, every time I go to a fucking conference and there's a keynote and it's an author talking about how magical their public library was when they were a kid and how the children's librarian, no offense to your mom, Josh, was like the greatest person who like ever fucking lived. I like want to shoot myself.

Because libraries are more than just places. Wow, you want to shoot my mother? Unbelievable. He did say that. I said myself, but. Justin. God, you are on that minute. I just put it's just like people,

people have this idea of public libraries that they are just for children. And so like the child loci is like at the public library right now. But now it's like moving like, well just trans people existing in public is now like where the foci is. Like the transes are getting your kids. And so like maybe it'll move away from libraries in particular. But everyone should go read Lee Edelman.

and I feel like that will help. Get on the fuck them kids. Like mindset, it helps. I love being a hater and just being like, well, I don't care about your stupid non-existent children who's not alive yet. That's right. That's right. Speaking of hypothetical children, though, when we were talking about the accepting of

the conservative framing on this, this is something liberals are also really bad at, which is saying, like, okay, you want to control what your children read. Well, I want my children to read those books. And the only one who can tell my children what they read is me. And that's also bad. Children, as soon as they have a library card, should have free reign to everything in the library. And they should be able to check it out. And they should be able to do so with no one else's consent.

You know, if we want to set an age limit for that of like 10 or 13, fine. I think children from the moment they can read. Any book is a kid's book if the kid can read, right? That's the Mitched. They will understand the dirty jokes. It's fine. They won't get it. Or if they're upset by them, they'll put it away.

Right. Kids self-censor. They're like, I don't, I can't be reading about this. It makes me feel weird. I don't like it. And they're not ready for it. But they know to do that. I think that's a really important point, actually.

Because I remember reading books when I was younger and every once in while I'd read one where I'd be like, wow, that's. And this was not particularly like bad or disturbing stuff. It was just stuff that I wasn't ready for, you know, stuff about, let's say puberty, for instance, when I was still, I don't know, nine or 10. you know, like a little bit too early and being like, well, this is, this is weird for me right now. I'm going to put it away. But one of the great things about growing up Dutch Protestant in the great state of Michigan is that rather than accepting that as, oh, this is a little too early, maybe I can come back to it later, you develop a lifelong complex of guilt because you feel that you are filthy and wrong and you think that

the thing that you have read has made you dirty. People underestimate the Protestant guilt. It'll fucking get you. It's a different kind of guilt from Catholic guilt. It's just entirely different. We can't get out of it. Let's not even get into the Mormon guilt here, man. Oh, my fucking God.

It's not dissimilar, yeah, from what I've heard. Mostly around reproduction is my understanding with the Mormon guilt because it's a fertility cult. Yep, yep. Yeah, or you could be a kid like me who's like really interested in the Bible. And then if you want to read something spicy, you just read the song of Solomon again and again. and you're just like, oh, it says breasts. Damn, damn, your breasts are like, what? Two fawns?

Come on. Those pomegranates? I want to grab hold of one of those pomegranates, baby. Come on, put that shit in my mouth. Never look at a grocery store, produce section of the same again. I want to put my mer between, my lover is my breast. Actually, at many times in Jewish history, they tried to remove the song of Solomon. Jay's making a face because I'm talking about the Bible.

I try to remove it because people would sing the song of Solomon as a drinking song. Oh, hell, yeah. How many, how many y'all are-bring that back? Massaging your breasts with my mur. If I still had them. Every night. Me with my burger. I don't have them.

Oh, okay. Well, I guess just your chest more generally. It's whatever. You just kind of take some burr. You throw it on your chest. You feel better. I have frankincense. Does that count?

It can. It can be gender initial. Okay. Is that the Frankencence poppers? No. I just have a frankincense oil roller. Oh, nice. I love the smell of frankincense.

I also have frankincet's soap. But yeah, I mean, I think like that that's a very, just to go back to the previous point, it's well made that like in general, when it comes to framing, because I think framing is so important. You never, ever, ever want to buy into the framing of the opposition. That's one of the biggest things that we talk about on our show is the way that media frames up the way that you ought to see an issue. And oftentimes it does it in a way that isn't explicit or even a parent. And the moment that it becomes a battle over what should your kids be allowed to do versus what should my kids be allowed to do, what are my parental ethics versus your parental ethics, then it becomes a culture war thing. Because of course if you are a liberal parent, your approach to parenting is going to be different from an evangelical. Christian. That's not going to be a fruitful. You're never going to be able to find any sort of common

ground there because it's impossible to even meet at first principles. And people just like don't understand evangelicals. They just don't. That's too. But it is also like this sort of anti-child way that we think about children as well as we think of children as property and as extensions of their parents and, you know, child liberation. So eventually in the third vote in November 2023, passes with a bunch lower turnout and they did the they did the labeling so I went on to the boards of trustees minutes and I started reading through you know the past few months and there were there were a couple things about like a patron came in I think it's one 24 and was harassing people again and so they had to say like okay because I've got some new members on the board now and

they seem pretty supportive and they said and most of them are very boring it's like here's our foot traffic it's up from this time last year or it's down because it's the holidays. And we're working on a weeding project. We're working on a labeling project, which I'm not sure if it's the LGBT stuff, I think because there's only 90 books. So they're talking about some kind of labeling.

So I don't know if they've been doing more types of labeling since then. I'm not sure. The minutes are very, very, or the meeting notes, yeah, the minutes are very sparse. But I also mentioned that they are coming up on a $40,000 budget shortfall, which means they will have to go up for a millage vote again at some point, probably not too far in the future, because $40,000 is a big chunk of their $270,000 budget. So in the next couple of years, this could be up for a vote again, and who knows where the political wins will be, but I really hope that it's an uneventful vote.

But it does look like they are, you know, they got funds from every library, that they are allowed to distribute for different things. They were talking about how they were going to use that money. And this is, you know, I think I have a story in here somewhere of other places in Michigan. that are having, yeah, Alpina Public Library was in Book Riot. Lapeer Public Library in Michigan was also subject to a lot of this kind of stuff. Yeah, like, how has this been affecting, like, your mom? Well, that's an interesting question because my mom is not at a public library. Oh.

My mom is the librarian at a Christian school. Oh. And, you know, she is doing her best to work within the constraints of that system, you know, because people are hypervigilant right now against woke, right? And at the end of the day, I think as my mom sees it, her primary role is just to, you know, instill a love of reading in kids and give them resources that help them understand their place in this.

But it turns out that any children's literature that even alludes to the idea of getting along with people is woke now. And so it's actually proven quite difficult. I mean, you can see parallels to this in theater. as well, right? Where the Kennedy Center, now that it is fully going to be, like, giving us whatever the Trump equivalent of Shen Yun is, I'm sure. That's going to be really cool. Just Evita all the time. Yeah, exactly. At the Kennedy Center, they've been canceling programming for children. There was like something about like a shark that wanted to be friends with other fish.

That's woke. Get it out of here. It's just, it's just the movie shark tale. Look, you're telling me. So this is the other thing, I guess, about like framing and rhetoric. I do think that there are ways that if you can present literature as something that has the ability to just connect people and tell fun stories, you can get pretty far. But it's always going to run up against a hard limit when it comes to things that are explicitly about gender, about sexuality, about race. And at that point, within this mindset, this mindset that sees anything about that even tangentially has to do with an issue as a threat. Yeah. That causes people to immediately go into a defensive crouch.

And I don't know that there's any way to reason that. I think that you can materially, obviously, bring about change in your community. There's some power in rhetoric. But at the end of the day, I think some of this does have to come about through sheer political force. I was going to say, though, I would love to have your mom on the podcast. I know that would probably be a non-starter, but I wanted to do a church libraries episode and like, I suppose thinking now Christian schools as well, because I would love to talk about like church libraries, like modern church libraries. Because like the big, we jump church as a lot. I don't really understand why.

My grandfather was just, you know, very particular about where he wanted to go. And he was always, he was one of those people who really believed you give 10% of your income to the church, which is not a common thing. And so wherever he went, he was in a position of leadership because he was funding that bitch. Sure. So he was always a deacon at every church we went to, like immediately because he was, you know, he was building churches. He was a carpenter. So, you know, wherever we went, he was immediately ingrained in the leadership of the church. And so we jumped around a lot.

But one of them was a First Baptist church. It was a big one. And we had library that you could go and you could check out books from the church library. And I would love to talk about that because, you know, that was where I would get some of those cool. I don't even know the name of the series, but there was like a live action slash animated series of stories in Genesis. So there would be like,

they would go down like this little cheap plastic slide or something and they would be transported into this world where this like narrator was, and he would tell them a turban or whatever. And he would tell them Bible stories. This like creepy, creepy strange man would tell you Bible stories. And then it would switch to the animation

for the Bible stories. Like if anyone's going to know, it's going to be Josh. That's kind of why I brought it up. Okay, so I don't, that sounds kind of like something, which I'm pretty sure is different, which was a VHS series called Secret Adventures, in which there was a girl who was like a babysitter. And then she had two little kids who were in her charge. And then they would imagine what it was like to be like, I don't know, fish or whatever. And then they would learn a lesson because that would be in the world of animation.

and then the lesson that they learned in the animated world would help them out in real life. And so in this episode that I'm thinking of, the babysitter was running for class president at her school, but she was basically telling scurrilous rumors about her competitor, the other candidate that she was running against. And then they learned in the world of Under the Sea that if you tell rumors, then a shark kills you or something.

It always seems to come back to sharks for some reason. I don't know. I don't know. But that shark was not woke. That shark was not woke. That was a right shark. No, that shark was telling scurrilous rumors. And they ate you.

Yeah, I always wonder, you know, how do people who work in these libraries? Many of them have worked in libraries. Might be librarians, retired librarians, might be library assistants who understand how circulation works. I helped a monastery actually move their collection. So it was the library for the sisters. so, you know, they're out there. But, you know, it's kind of hard to bring them on to a leftist library worker podcast. I think maybe I can get a universalist to come on, but they're just going to be hippie-dippy at me.

Yeah, you know, you is sort of its whole own thing. I know so many people in Massachusetts really grew up U-U, and I'm like, no. I've had literal nightmares about getting stuck in U-U services. Oh, God. Like actual nightmares. Where it's just like they're reading some fucking thing from, I don't know James Madison being like, and people can work together. It's like, thanks. Yeah. It's like the kind of, it's like when I went out to like the Bay Area and it made me feel

conservative, I'm like, this is just too much. Well, yeah. They are too woke out there is the thing. There's two woke out there. I need to calm down a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So go go, go, calm down, eat some pomegranates. Rub a little bit of frankinson on you. Get some mer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a new strapper. on harness. God. Do you know this, Josh? No.

I mean, I didn't know that you got that. But thank you for the information. I can't wait to have your cock in my mouth. I'm going to give you the blowjob of your life. Blow job. Such great. It's like senator or something reading aloud. Some like challenged books in like a hearing.

That is always my favorite thing. It's so. Especially when you get like the like mom. moms who like break down in tears because there's a book that has the word cock in it and they can't handle it. And it's just, and that's, I guess that's the only other thing that I wanted to say is that the people who end up pushing these sorts of bands forward, the reason that they do it is that they are fundamentally uncomfortable with something about themselves. That's, that's what it comes down. And sometimes it's their gender, sometimes it's their sexuality. Sometimes it's that they've always

wanted to do something or see something, but we're never able to. And so they want to make sure that nobody else can have that experience, but it all fundamentally comes down to this desire to make sure that nobody can experience the thing that makes them afraid. Yeah, it's like, I had to learn this, so you have to learn this. I got married to 18 and didn't get to live my life until, you know, I got divorced at 45 and, you know, married a woman and married another woman, you know, that kind of story that happens, you know, quite a lot, quite honestly. And practice saying cock while you're doing the dishes. Just like coming in. It'll help. So, I don't know, Maybe that's one other practical strategy.

I don't know how practical it is, but just on an interpersonal level. Just like getting, it takes a lot of work and it's not something that I'm personally equipped to do in my day to day life because I have too much of too much shit going on in my own life. But like, see how much of what people are saying is just the first barrier, the first line of defense. And then by listening, try to actually get in there and see what's really going on. Because, and that's going to take, that's a lot of work. That's very hard. It's not for most people. And like I said, it's definitely not for me.

But that's something that you can do outside of the more material. It's like organizing stuff. There is research on this, and one of the things that is quite common is there is a fallacy that's quite common. Fallacy is just happening in our brain naturally, that if I can reject one part of an argument, I can reject the rest of it. So people will look for that one thing, and this also creates what's called a worldview defense, which is a person will listen to you until you say something that directly challenges something they hold unchangeable about themselves. And the moment that activates, the conversation's kind of over. The good news is there's also research that shows that repeated exposure to ideas that are different than them do get through even if people's barriers are up. So it is not a lost game. People can change.

People change throughout their whole life. It's not over till it's over, you know. You know what might be a place for people to engage in stuff like that would be a local library. Just spitball. Wow. I'm sure there's a book or two that says cock in there. Maybe. Yeah.

In these unprecedented times? I hope so. The New Testament. Exactly. And it says ass and it has incest in there. I was in a Christian band called Balam's ass. They made them change it to Balam's donkey. That sounds, no.

Balam's ass is a good name. Balam's donkey is not. I know. That sounds like a Depeche Mode cover band for some reason. It's probably not, but I would listen to a Depeche Mode cover band called Balam's ass. It was fun. He made it really easy for me to do Depeche Mode at karaoke, so I think we can make this happen. It's fun, right?

Yeah. All right. Well, that's everything I had in the notes. Josh, do you want to tell people where they can find you? And what's coming up next for you? Sure. Well, yeah. No, I, first of all, thank y'all so much for having me on.

This is something that I've been wanting to talk about for a long time, but I just wasn't sure where to do it. So it was like, oh, a library podcast. Perfect. I, I co-host a podcast called The Worst of All Possible Worlds. Every week we talk about a different piece of media and we talk about the narratives within it, the explicit ones, the implicit ones, and just in general how those media narratives shape the world that we live in. We cover a whole range of stuff where, you know, video games, movies, TV shows, The Theta, pretty much you name it. We've probably covered something connected to something that you like.

So you can check us out wherever you get your podcasts. Worstpossible. dot world is our website. And we also have a Patreon. Patreon.com slash worst of all where you can get access to our premium episodes for the very affordable price of $5 a month. But if you're, if you're, debating between that $5 and I don't know, donating $5 to somebody in your community, please donate it to somebody in your community. Find a library you can donate it to, you know? Yeah, which reminds me, this is the first episode since we did the library punk one year fundraiser, which is the first fundraiser we've won and we've ever run. And I do want to say that.

we met our goal before the next episode came up. So in three days, everyone funded us. So thank you all so much. It really means a lot, especially since I no longer have a job. It helps us keep the show running. And it's really made, it's really taken a whole load off of my mind. Yeah, give the good hosts of this show your money. Do it. If you haven't already done it, do it. I'm going to say it. Somebody's got to say it. Give them your money. We never asked for money. We just like give shit away for free. We have like free stencils and everything. That's very librarian coded of you, yeah. Yeah, we're like, fuck the police, here's this for free. We're going to do consciousness raising, you know. And so we were like, do we do a fundraiser? It was really because Violet Fox reached out as soon as she heard that I was unemployed and said, hey, do you need a fundraiser running? I'll promote it and everything.

I said, no, no, let me think about it for a little bit. And I was like, you know what would be nice to cover is just the podcast stuff? Because I just had gotten my yearly bills for all that. And it's like, let's do this. Let's cover this for the next year. It's in Castorine cheap. Over the course of a year, it's really not. It's also not too expensive.

No, but it's more than it should be. It is. Especially we don't use it to its full extent. We do it so that we don't have to do the clappy thing. Right. Yeah. So, anyway, thank you, Josh, so much for coming on. Hey, thank you for having me again.

And thank you all. This has been a delight. And thank your mom. Okay. Yeah. Just out there fighting a good fight. Shuts out to your mom. mom.

Shoutouts to Josh's mom. Let's go. Shoutouts to my grandma, my dearly departed grandma, also a children's librarian, who I just discovered there are some writings of hers that are also available at a library that I wasn't aware of. So I'm in beginning on that shit soon, too.

Very exciting. Hell yeah. Let us know. Keep us updated. It was her ladies' Christian writing club. Ooh. Ooh. I feel like that must be to be a fly on the wall.

All right. Good night. night.