librarypunk - 157 - The Politics of Weeding and Little v. Llano County

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

We’re back! We’re talking about weeding and library collections as government speech.  Media mentioned https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/25/is-including-hidden-ai-prompts-in-academic-papers-gaming-the-peer-review-system-or-keeping-it-honest/  https://buttondown.com/wellsourced/archive/CREW-Method-Manual/ https://bookriot.com/little-vs-llano-county-fifth-circuit/  Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/dgpnufmm  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/qWPTurTnkT Companion zine for the episode: https://smazzie.itch.io/the-politics-of-weeding-and-little-v-llano-county-zine 

All right. Let's see if this still works. I'm Justin. I'm an academic librarian. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay cataloging librarian and my pronouns are he, him. Yay. We're back. We're our own guests. Yay. Yay. Good job, everyone.

We made it through winter. Hybernated. Still making it through winter. Yeah, has everyone's polar vortex going. The snow hasn't melted in Boston yet. I got nothing. Sorry to miss out on the collective experience. Yeah, Justin was trapped here when it happened.

It was fun. I heard. Yeah. I was trapped. It was really weird and they kept delaying my flight. And they just read. The weird thing is like they made me fly back through JFK, which is the exact same distance. Like it's a three hour flight from Boston to Tampa.

And they're like, why don't you fly for an hour to New York first? And then fly three hours from New York, Florida. And they were, there were a bunch of like, gray jumpsuit wearing teenagers maybe doing TikToks in JFK, but not in like a, I don't know if JFK looks fancy or if I was just in like the sketchy part of JFK or something where it doesn't look very impressive, but it was just like the very dirty part of JFK.

It was very sad looking part. I'd never been to JFK before. I was not impressed as is in a back corridor. At least it's not Newark. Newark is the worst of them of the airports in that reason. and I hated every second of being in Newark. I have airport opinions because of how often I've flown. I have so many airport opinions

because I've been to airports everywhere in the continental U.S. except for the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, we've got to tell you much about the ones in the Pacific Northwest even. Just last time I was through C-TAC, it was a mess of construction. So I could not have told you anything about it.

Yeah. I forgot that I put like a stag. in here, like six months ago in these notes when I started this episode. Oh, yeah. I forgot about this article. I don't think I'm going to talk about it. Hidden AI prompts and academic papers, which is funny. The idea that you do the same thing that you do to, like, students by putting, like,

hidden AI prompts in the assignments so that when they copy and paste it into chat GPT, it'll tell chat GPT, like, use this word five times. To try and catch academics, try and. to do that in their scholarly publications. Yeah, so they're putting AI prompts in... Like, calls for papers. In the paper itself, no, in the paper. And so when the peer reviewer throws it into ChatGPT,

it says, like, say that this paper's great. Huh. I think it's also just fair. You know what? I don't hate it. I haven't seen, I haven't seen, like, a good, like, academic paper where it says, like, absolutely. here's a paper about, like at the top of the paper

where it's clearly been generated by AI. I haven't seen one of those in a while. Yeah. I look like fucking, my hair looks like Alan Cumming, but I forget which movie. It also looks like Gary Oldman in the Fifth Element right now.

But there's a specific Alan Cumming role that I can't place that's this hair. I just realized it. You don't see yourself at this angle enough. Uh-huh. Do I always look like Alan coming or something? No, you look like the AFI guy. Oh, yeah.

I'll take that. Yeah. I'll take that. Yeah. I've no idea. Davey Havoc. Davy Havoc. He looks like a cool hippie now.

He doesn't look emo anymore. Still hot, but, you know. I always heard his name is Hattuck. Did not know if Xon where they call him. Davy Hattick's house is painted black. Yeah. Okay. So I've wanted to talk about weeding for a while

because in the Fifth Circuit, this case came about. We can just jump into it if we don't have any more shooting the shit to do. Or we could just shoot the shit as it comes up. I don't know what we're going to do. I figure it's been so long and we haven't complained about the news publicly in a while that if we just get sidetracked, whatever, it's fine. We can just go off on tangents about all this weird stuff. But anyway, there was a Fifth Circuit case, which was Little Beelano County,

which I assume would be Yano, but I've lived in Texas long enough to know. that it's not pronounced the way it's spelled. It's definitely just pronounced as if Peggy Hill is pronouncing it. Oh, I thought it might be Laino then instead of... Laino? I don't know. Yeah. It could be Lano.

Because the vowels do shift up when they move into English. Like Coyote becomes Coyote. I mean, probably I didn't decide to look it up. But in May 23rd, 2025, little be Lano County. I'm curious. The First Amendment can't be used to challenge. book removals in the Fifth Circuit cases. So the Fifth Circuit is like a feeder for conservative cases to the Supreme Court because basically you can go to West Texas and get this one very specific judge and then it will Lano.

No, it's actually as in bad Lano. So it's not Lano or Lano, it's Lano, it's Lano, like bad Lano. I don't know. I don't land on brand. Yeah, it happened. It's Texas accident's word. So there's a very specific feeder case that I don't know if they're trying to get this to the Supreme Court. I don't think they were because the Supreme Court turned this one down.

So this just kind of sits. But I thought it was interesting because the government's argument is that because libraries are our government entities, that all weeding decisions are ultimately government speech. so the government can say whatever it wants or not say whatever it wants, which is interesting to me. But anyway, I'll talk about the case a little bit more. So it overrules the Campbell case precedent, which was, I thought I put three cases. Yeah, the Campbell case, which was 1995, which was the one that put the Supreme Court case, Pico from 1982, into effect. It upheld Pico, which was saying that you have a first time.

Amendment right to be balanced against book removals. So in the Campbell case, the decision of St. Tammany Parish School Board in Louisiana to remove the book, Boodoo and Hoodoo by Jim Haskins. From the public school libraries in the parish, most of the first book, first half of the book discovers evolution and practice of voodoo and hoodoo. The second half is devoted the presentation of spells tricks. And rather than dismissing Pico discussed it at length, it emphasized the unique role of the school library and students must always be remain free to inquire to study and gain new maturity and understanding and the court ruled that even though the constitutional analysis of pico plurality opinion so pico was not a majority opinion it was only signed on by

four of the justices so it's considered a weak argument it's it's it can serve as guidance for this case so and then remanded it back down to the the lower court so the new case from last year little be Lano. Lano. It's a Texas book removal case in that it concerns public libraries, not school library. So Pico and Campbell are both about school libraries rather than public ones. And I think it's interesting because the government speech sort of thing is being used pretty aggressively in Florida to say like the school can say whatever it wants because it is the government saying it. And this is a little different because this is a public library so there's no compulsive aspect to it. Yes, Jay. Yes. Yes. I'm trying to be good and I interrupt.

I think this, like, not that I agree with book banning or anything, but I think this does raise an interesting, like, professional question about how weeding is approached, depending on what kind of library you are. And I, like, I think the fact that, like, a public library, maybe even some, like, academic libraries at our state schools, like, if you are, are a wing of government or something, like, does that affect the decisions you make in your collection more so than if you were not? And where does this place, like the New York Public Library, for example, which is technically not part of city government, it's a nonprofit, like, with a CEO and everything.

Like, I'm not as much involved in, like, collection development, so I wouldn't know. But, like, you know, maybe it's naive or just me not being familiar enough, but like these kinds of questions, depending on what kind of library is, I wonder how often that is actually considered just in collection management. Well, the government speech angle intrigues me too, just because, like, all of the libraries that I have worked for have been independent tax entities. They're not tied to city like they're they're they serve like the county but they're not part of the county government so like i guess we're quasi like i've always said quasi government because it has tax dollars but there we don't have an overseeing government so whose speech are we supposed to be i mean does that mean

that some libraries can go rogue and be like well our government speech says fuck trump we're removing every book about him in the library like what i i guess i just don't really see why this is why this is the argument, you know? But no, as far as collections go, yeah, the fact that it's public library is what concerns me most, I guess. Yeah, and it's the cases that you can't use the First Amendment to argue against a removal. So the thing about all of these individual cases, and I should probably have like really dived into Little B. Lano County more, But I was more interested in comparing them. So maybe I'll have to come back to this particular case to get like the specifics.

But I thought in general, it's interesting that this government speech angle is being used. Because like, yeah, if say you are a special tax district and you remove a book from the public library, then someone sues the library for removing it under a First Amendment challenge, which you would. would be under via the 14th Amendment, but like, is it the tax district itself, the library itself saying you can't argue with us on the basis of the First Amendment because it's our speech in the same way that like if you were a private library, it's your speech. You couldn't be sued on a First Amendment ground. So I guess it's kind of saying that like there just is no First Amendment recourse no matter what, which is interesting. But it also has all these other

problems because like then it comes against like every collection development decision is a speech decision which is like incoherent because the government doesn't set the collection development policy even if it does the collection decisions made are within the realm of the policy so any decision could be like well that's the government's decision even if the government's decision is to is just sort of like an automatic payment system for purchasing books based on checkouts right like at what point is then a package you buy from a vendor that you have no curatorial decision in besides the fact that you decided to buy that package or like something like Hoopla or something at what point is then Hoopla responsible for government speech?

Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah, because this is, I guess the reason I want to talk about it the most is because we were always saying like when you are a librarian, you have to. grapple with the fact that you work for the state usually. If you're like for a public library or a public university, you have to like grapple with the fact that like your policies about homelessness, our government policy, your policies about like what you buy are government policy. And so when we talked with like, particularly like Emily Knox, we were talking about I was I was kind

of getting at this kind of weakness in the plurality. approach of library collections, which is like, you know, if we're going to start collecting materials that are like fascist adjacent, or do we deselect these materials as opposed to propagating them? Like, you've got like the Nazi bar problem, like when, which is not like a real problem. Because also you don't know why someone's checking, like this is the thing where I kind of live out a little bit. You also never know why someone's checking something out and I think that's a good thing. But also, I don't want Nazi shit in a library. But also, like, Like, this is like a little conflict that I do not know how to resolve in myself,

like professionally or politically. I just am full don't a hair away about it. I'm going to cyborg it. I'm going to stay with the trouble. I'm not going to try to resolve it. I'm going to be like, okay, these are contradictions. And I'm accepting that in myself. But I honestly like do not, like I catch myself living out a little bit sometimes.

And I'm like, no, no, no. Like, we don't know why someone's checking. something out and yet, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't mean I have to fucking buy it, but, like, still. I mean, that was why I was pushing at it so hard, because, like, during that season of library punk, I was like, let's really, like, cap on the glass of the liberal understandings of what we're doing. That's why I was pushing that so hard. Now, I'm like, yeah, the pluralism that liberalism has is, like, one of the good things about liberalism is, like, this, like, wide tolerance for plurality. And after that, I had started to, like, think more about anarchist,

thinking of like plurality in society. And like, you know, you can't have this coercive power over other people. So like you're going to have a society where one of the major values is going to be an enforced pluralism of like you are going to have to tolerate a wide variety of opinions and perspectives, even if you were in an anarchist society. It doesn't mean that things don't have consequences. Like, I feel like that's where people get tripped up as they think the like tolerance for intolerance means that there's no consequences. I don't think that's the case. But I think one of

the strongest things about sort of the dominant professional model of how we view a person's right to read, whatever they want, is that like we do not know how like, I'm always just reminded of what Dr. Knox told me when I was in grad school is that like we are so convinced in the power of reading and that it changes people and that we do not trust how people will be changed, especially people of marginalized groups, groups which we want to control in some way, either as an, you know, either or as like an oppressive thing and or like as like a patronizing patriarchal thing, you know, but like truly, like at the end of the day something is printed text on a piece of paper, that in and of itself cannot harm anybody. And like I think a lot about, because not to bring in like internet discourse,

but like I think about the way that things which are challenging get conflated with things which are harmful. And also people doing, like people, maybe someone did read a book and got inspired by it and did harmful things because of it. Like, is that book harmful, though? Because if I read that book and don't do that same thing, right? Like, at the end of the day, how much are we blaming, like, how much are we redirecting blame because, like, the unpredictability of the human psyche terrifies us, and we want to control that.

And we just want to impede control, like, through fucking social reproduction. as librarians, you know, keep people from reading the shoddy and pernicious books and shape them into how we want, right? And at what point is that not our job? Like, at what point is this a fear response? I don't know. Maybe I, you know, permission to live out a little bit every once in a while. I'll admit when maybe I've been wrong in the past. I don't know if I'm wrong now. I don't know. again, I don't know how to resolve this contradiction in myself. But at a certain point, I see people pointing at, oh, that thing harmed somebody because they read it and did this. And I'm like, this is like when people are still like throwing shade at Catcher in the Rye because the dude who shot John Lennon read it.

And like, he was reading. Yes, no, he was reading Catcher in the Rye and then was sitting there reading it when the police came and like had written a note in it or something. like Ben that is like because I catch her in the listener you were allowed to hate me Catch her in the Rise one of my favorite books

but like I've heard that my whole fucking life because I love that book so much and it means so much to me but that oh that's the fucking you know edge lord I'm going to shoot John Lennon book like I don't know at like

a certain point like at what point are we misdirecting our action towards a book versus other things. I think there is a discussion to be had about how much of a collection space and budget is dedicated towards certain types of materials. I think that is a discussion we can absolutely have.

But also, like, then, you know, I'm also just like, someone doing something bad because they write a book is not the fault of that book or the person who wrote it, quite frankly. That person may even have done other things that are bad. But I don't know. This is where I'm, a mask off, I live out a little bit. I'm sorry. Anyway, I'm derailing us. Well, I can't remember if it was

in the notes or one of the articles, but, oh, it was talking about the crew method, right? Yeah. It's very mathematical. Yeah. And, but the thing that has always kind of, like, stuck in the back of my head about collection policies and et cetera is the matches the needs of your community. and how kind of vague that is because, like, you can turn around and have people being like, well, we have a very conservative Mormon, so we should have, you know, all of these terrible Mormon romances and none of the ones, you know, kind of things. But then it's also like there are literally queer and people of color everywhere. So what part of the community ratio is, are you making that judgment call? And I know that that's kind of lower down on the, you know, misinformation, out of date, et cetera, sort of rubric. But I am curious how librarians deal with that specific sort of standard in practice. Like, how does that material affect what books go on your shelves or not? So, I don't know. If there are listeners who have ideas about that, join the Discord and tell me, because I'm always super curious about it. As helpful as I think the crew method

is because I remember looking at it when I was in my previous job and had, you know, collection decision power. And I remember looking at it and thinking like when you reduce everything down to like statistics like this, it removes the messy human element from it. And it's like when you distance yourself from the messy human element of it, it's almost like saying, oh, I didn't make this decision. The numbers did. And I'm just following what the numbers tell me to do. it almost feels like a weird deflection of responsibility, even if it is really useful. But like you're saying,

at what point do you, who's the community, who's the patron in your head and who's not represented by that? How do you balance? Like, oh, well, I live here. Like, where I live, like, it's largely liberal. That doesn't mean there's not other types of people.

And so at what point, like how much is the collection balance to accommodate the majority opinion versus the minority, and how do you quantify that? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, the reason the crew method was interesting is because, like, I used the crew method in that

I just literally have a, like, a note by, like, where I put our donations that says, like, musty. And it's just like, you know, or I just have like a paraphrased version of musty, which is just like, are these moldy or destroyed? Are they something we already? have? Are they something we have online? And then just like kind of like the basics that I use it for. So I mean, it is all just human. It's it's interesting that the crew method was pulled because it does

get referenced in the fifth sort in the fifth circuit, which is from the majority opinion, a Texas Wheating Manual Instructural Libraries. By the way, Kelly Jensen did a lot of early reporting on this. It's really good. And she yeah, she pulled out. Yeah. So she pulled this, this quote from it. I also have the ruling open. My Texas Wheating Manual instructs libraries to weed books that contain stereotyping or gender and racial biases. Whatever else one might think of the advice of these guidelines, it's unmistakably viewpoint discrimination, and by the plaintiff's account, all of it violates the First Amendment that cannot be the law. So again, it's this weird thing of like, is the librarian

who uses the crew method to say, like, this book is, like, outdated in its gender stereotyping. Is that librarian the one doing the government speech? Because, like, this whole thing is a response to 17 books about, like, race and gender being pulled from this county public library. Yeah. And, like, specific targeting to put, to, like, remove from public spaces, not just school, curriculum, which has like this coercive aspect, but like the non-coercive aspect of a public library, of it just being there. Right.

Like school libraries have a pedagogical goal. Public libraries do not. And you have to go to school. You don't have to go to the public library. Yeah. Right. I mean, Texas probably don't have to go to school either. Like, you type to school.

Yeah, let's be real. I mean, like, homeschooling laws. The homeschooling laws there are probably crazy. It's like right after I moved, like, all. all the worst laws in Florida are getting picked up in Texas. And Texas A&M is like so fucked up. Like Texas A&M is like, I don't know if I'd be able to visit you anymore.

I mean, I don't visit you now because Florida. But like I wouldn't have been, like hot take going to Texas was great when I got to. I never had a single fucking transphobic or homophobic incident ever, except for seeing this guy in Dallas come out of an airport bathroom with a transphobic shirt on. but I could run into that here in Boston. So, but now, like, just legally it would be dubious for me to go.

We saw Mr. Maga in Times Square. I mean, like, we saw the MAGA dude walking around with his MAGA hat and America flag. It's like, man, you just, do you not get enough attention? No. Walking around in the middle of Times Square. No one in Times Square gets enough attention. Why else are they there? So many TikTokers, it was very funny.

Hey, guys, what's up? People walking around TikTok and in Times Square. Like, it is so cold out. Why are you doing this? I made Justin walk through Times Square with me because I like walking. We walk like 40 blocks or something. It's great. I love walking.

And New York's a great place to walk through. It was a great place to walk. And we were fine. I'm used to it now. I walk a lot. You're welcome. You're welcome. I do it at home.

I don't know. I got to practice. Blame Boston's bad public transit system. I just walk a lot. But yeah, it's interesting, like at the bottom of the crew article that I was referencing, there's a note. And it says that this means Matt Krause's slap dash list of age or 50 books he decided should be pulled from libraries in Texas back in 2021 would be what would need to be pulled in Texas since he as a government official made the decision. Of course, we don't know what happened if a librarian said no to this, since the librarian is by this court ruling, also a government official. if government Abbott decided he didn't think

some of the books need to be banned who is the actual final say among government officials like there is no hierarchy because like yeah if you're in a tax district like who tells the tax district what to do and I guess like it would just be for the library wouldn't it? I guess but then they're not employees

of the state so they're not state government would be their advisory it would be like county thing it would be like the judge yeah because like a city I mean because that makes for example if this were to happen at the Boston Public Library, which is a city body.

It's part of the city department, but it has its own board of trustees, right, and which are appointed, and like Mayor Wu does things, but also it is the library for the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So then would the governor have to get involved? But it's not the state library.

There is a state library of Massachusetts, but it's not the library of the Commonwealth. You know, like... I think what I'm... Like, oh, go ahead. I think the thing, no, go ahead, Sedi, because I'm going to, I'm going to go off on the thing. Oh, okay. Well, like, when I think about, like, the different libraries I've worked for, at least one of them, the library board was an appointed position by the county commission.

That is not so in my current county. I'm not entirely certain what it is, but, like, it's not, it doesn't involve the county. They're, like, appointed through a different method. So it's also like, so, yeah, is that the library board is. it like the mayor of the county? Like at what point can small localities start going, you know what, I'm going to try to fucking turn this in my favor. And I don't have anybody above me and my board is on or my board is on board with this. So let's fucking go. Like I don't know. Maybe it's just my deep desire for these assholes to fuck around and find out. But I'm really curious to see how some of

this plays out. Because I both under completely understand the government speech. angle in a way in as much as it's like we're trying to remind people that librarians are often agents of the state and especially people who have these sort of like caveat library socialism is very cool but also

a lot of people who say the like oh libraries are socialist and if they they couldn't be made today because they're socialists I'm like no actually I mean they are agents of the state and you can have state socialism I guess but like people forget that libraries are

agents of the state a lot of the time and aren't thinking through what that means. So part of me is a little refreshed that people are like, oh, actually, but they're using it for evil. So I'm like, fuck, damn it. I hate when I'm right. And then it's bad. Which makes me think that like the main virtue of Pico saying that there is a first amendment like recourse is just to stop the state from being like, okay, we'll just throw out books we don't like left and right, rather than like stopping to think and going, maybe we should like have to leave some stuff in. Because like, yeah, Pico was like unenforceable because like the Fifth Circuit says like, you know, every weeding decision, every collection decision is government speech.

And so like is there First Amendment recourse for every single weeding decision and every single collection decision. I mean, Pico was about to have access something. So you could say like any single thing you choose not to buy or anything you choose to weed has a First Amendment recourse. But the library obviously can't buy

everything and you can't be a member of every library because you are only a member of the library that you're taxed for unless you buy membership to another library, in which case that's not a First Amendment thing. Anyway, but no library could have every book. So it's... It feels like when they started doing the thing with copyright, where individual

librarians could get sued or whatever. You'll remember that when they were making those fair use decisions specifically for academic librarians or something. Instead of like the library itself or the university getting in trouble, it was like when there was like fair use or like copyright claims or something, like an individual librarian could be liable. Or, you all remember that? I did not hallucinate that.

I remember this. I promise. I mean, if you're a librarian for you have qualified immunity because you're... Oh, this was a thing, I promise. Was this for like burning CDs back in the limelire days? No, this was like three years ago. I have no memory of this. Yeah, neither do I.

No, I remember Kyle talking about it. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's been some crazy things that Kyle is saying. But yeah, I couldn't tell you. But it's interesting that like the whole like brunt of this like, decision is coming on the heels of like Texas and Florida in particular trying to remove like having a concerted movement to remove things from libraries and then PICO being overturned as like a vestige of moderating force on that. So it's interesting because like I don't I don't know if Pico was a correct decision but I understand why it was made because it like just

forces the government to stop and think before it can remove anything, even if it's like not a real, like in the same way that like whenever there's a public ordinance against like drag, it's not about like actually criminalizing, because someone was just talking about this with the Utah's drag ban with someone saying that like lewdness and pornography are being separated out and it's like, well, it's not about actually hitting people with a lewdness prosecution. it's about stopping venues from hosting drag events because they're like, well, there's this lewdness law. And so I think Pico is just like,

it's not about actually entertaining First Amendment lawsuits constantly, but just stopping the government from going, hey, we're going to cut this because it's government speech. But now the right is, you know, I don't know, I should actually look up who decided what in Pico. It's the Burger Court. Man, I don't know the late 70s or the early 80s court. Thurgood Marshall is still there.

Sandra Day O'Connor. Yeah, I don't remember which ones are these. For justice as ruled it was unconstitutional. Four concluded the contrary, and one concluded the court need not to decide the question on the merits. And the plurality was Brennan and Marshall and Stevens. So that's the liberals. And then Blackmun had a concurrence, which basically is just trying to do a middle way. So, yeah, I guess it was the liberals on the court.

So this was always something that it's interesting that the Fifth Circuit kind of applied it. And now I was saying, actually, no, we should never have applied it. But the reason I caught on to the government speech thing was in Florida, it's taking this position quite a bit. So HB 1069 passed in 2023 and it went to effect that year. This has led to a lot of removals in libraries, schools, because of the sexual conduct thing. because HB 1069 is not like the don't say gay bill, but it's just another one of the many Florida laws that I wasn't living in Florida at the time,

so I wasn't like keeping up with all of these, but you can find it on the Florida Freedom to Read Project. It allows content to remain after a district review determines which ages should not be allowed to access, but the Florida Department of Education did not give that guidance when it told people what to do, so there's just a constant like airing on the side of caution. So it's just essentially a lot of this is like Moms for Liberty stuff,

which is like people get a long list of books and they're just trying to remove as many of them as possible. And in the higher education space, there's the Stop Woke Act, which is very funny. Because Florida is very funny like that. And Woke is in all capitals, so I'm sure it stands for something. Hell. Hang on. I'm going to look up what Stop Woke Act. Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act.

Oh my fucking God. let's fucking go let's just create stupid acronyms for everything I love a stupid acronym redubbed the individual freedom act but this is this is their law that's just like anti-dei law which is it restricts schools and businesses

from promoting things so the business is one is kind of shocking to be honest usually businesses are the wild wild west because they're not government The libertarian angle, you can't tell me what to do it's my business. Like, now you're telling people what to do. Live for your don't, baby. Yeah.

Public accommodation law, I don't know. The Wikipedia page for the Stop Book Act is very small. But anyway, there's an inside higher ed piece where the lawyer who is arguing in front of the 11th Circuit that a professor's speech is government speech and that the state, when it's a speaker, can choose what it wants to say. it can insist that professors not offer or espouse or endorse viewpoints that are contrary to the states. So one of the judges on the panel said, could a legislature prohibit professors from saying anything negative about a current gubernatorial administration?

And the lawyer arguing for the state said yes, because in the class, in the professor's speech, is the government speech, and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints. So again, there's like this higher education aspect of state speech, which is sort of like, I think this is also probably under like, it's an extension of one, just authoritarianism, but like the unified executive sort of theory that Trump is very big on. Like there are no independent aspects of government. If you report up through this chain of command, then that chain of command is absolute. So the DOJ has to do what you say. The treasury has to do what you say.

Like there is just no independent agencies. Of course, independence was always like a lie, but it's like there is no independence or small sovereignty in the same way that you would have in like higher education. Right, because like part of me is like it's not necessarily incorrect. It's just usually not a conservative argument usually. Yeah, and it's usually not weaponized like that. This is white. The state is bad. But I think it's sort of the distinction between like conservatism of like we know higher education.

is conservative. Ash just don't know that. They think it's out to get them. They don't realize that all of these assholes are like just the reason they want to be left alone is because they're all passing money to each other. And like this is like the jet ski dealership ruling class. Like, you know, all the jet ski dealership dudes are losing money right now because like they're realizing like, oh wait, this was all tilted in my favor.

Yeah, they're starting to do shit they could have done this whole time. Yeah. But I think that's a distinction. I thought was being done in the other way. I think it's one of the. interesting distinctions between like a rightist like movement like a fascist movement and traditional conservatism because like that independence of like let's have these state institutions but let's just like make it kind of hard for like black people to get in but otherwise we're

just going to leave it alone and you can teach whatever you want doesn't really matter we're going to put in some business schools in the 80s when we're worried like too many women are getting in so that the Waltons can start like you know influencing a whole bunch of stuff but otherwise we're we're, you know, going to let you be independent. And that's a traditional, like, yeah, we're going to let, we're going to let, like, the conservatism of our society sort of run that and said, no, actually, it's, it's all about owning the libs. And that's, like, sort of the difference of fascism.

It's, like, it's about libidinally feeling good all the time. Like, you must always be allowed to feel good about winning against your ideological opponents all the time. That's, like, a distinction of fascism. Yeah. Anyway, I'm reading, uh, uh, batise. You're in the time mode. Well, that's not even like something But Tai talks about, but I'm just reading like

World War II stuff because every once in a while I just like, when things get weird, I always like start reading World War II stuff because people are living through such a weird time and like watching how they deal with it. So like when I was dealing with like, you know, really bad mental health stuff, I was reading like Victor Frankel when he was talking about like, what's the point of living and stuff like that

when you're living through the Holocaust and like what's the point of life. So like I always like kind of end up bad. in this World War II period because it's so modern, but it's also like such a break from everyday life that reading people's journals and stuff is just so interesting. And that's why I started reading the time more because a lot of his works were written in like 1940,

1941 and are coming from his like daily journals. The thing is he really loves Nietzsche, so he likes writing everything in aphorisms. And it's just very much like, I went to an orgy the other day and it was really cool. and I made my existence and my non-existence come together in one. It's like, all right, whatever.

Yeah, it's me too. Every time I go to Fascination, Baby. Yes. Sorry, I had to make old man noises. I started reading Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Sam Delaney, and that also opens within each aphorism. Yeah, the great epochs of our life are where we win the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.

Folks have just completely unrelated. Folks that have read Times Square, red time square, red time square blue, you should. It's good. Sam Delaney rules. Anyway. Yeah, it's strange.

So the librarian documentary that came out. I haven't seen it. I got to see a screening of it in Boston. It kind of touches on book banning. I think it maybe brings up these cases. But it definitely brings up like, here's the list of books you have to take.

out. It dealt with both Texas and Florida librarians. It was good. It did have a bit of Storm Center at the beginning. Oh, funny. I was like, I wonder if they're going to include Storm Center. I bet these libs won't do that because that movie's about not

communism. And it sure did. And I was like, look at that. But also, there wasn't a single librarian of color in that movie. Telling on themselves. And all the librarians interviewed are like, I'm a veteran. I'm a pastor's wife. I'm a nice white lady.

Interview some like queer teenagers. But, and, but, like, that's kind of, all the librarians are like, I'm a, I could be a conservative too. Look, but I'm not. I'm just doing my job as a librarian. There's not a political statement at all.

So it's like, it was an early interesting documentary and it went over a lot of the politics of book bannings in both Texas and Florida and sort of how those like school boards and library boards operate. But also it was very much, I think, trying to pick a certain kind of librarian to showcase, you know, if that makes sense. It's a rhetorical strategy that I don't know it actually works because it's sort of like the Democrat approach of like, there's all these people out here who just want to be appealed to.

And it's like, I don't know if that's true. I think if like, I'm thinking a lot about like the attention economy. Like today, the Washington Post laid off a third of like all of its writers. And I've been listening to like a lot of like 404 media people talk about how hard it is to deal with like attention, like the attention economy and like why it skews so hard towards reactionary stuff because like that's all about outrage. And so it's not even that you need the algorithms to be biased necessarily in the position, but just like the nature of constant outrage and effective response is like really good for going viral. And someone was talking about like one of the reasons Mom Dani did well is like by being approachable, not by being serious, not by being like a position in a position that people are like looking towards with respect.

But there's also an aspect of is he riding a monster that? that like you don't have any control for where it's going. Because like it's always tenuous. That kind of like that kind of popularity. I also saw someone compare what Mom Donnie. Because I think Mom Donnie is cool. I think he's kind of a net positive right now.

But it's also the strategy of that's very common in like union busting of like, oh, we got rid of the bad management. Here's this new good management to pacify. you that actually removes attention away from the source of the problem. But he's the Yowie mayor though. So, yeah. All you New Yorkers to get to readheated rivalry to your heart's content.

That was pretty cool. I like the idea of like the confluence of municipal things of like not only are we going to like put out the cold weather thing, but we're also going to say, by the way, while you're stuck at home, here's stuff to do. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good strategy. Here, just read this gay pornography. Why don't you get the library, you know, to be one of the disaster responses rather than just being a heating center, but also like check out the library catalog.

And, you know, like, I don't know, like a week beforehand being like, sign up for your library card so that you can read books while you're snowed in. I don't know. Maybe more municipalities should do that. I think that's a good strategy just for good governance. get all this stuff working together. But yeah, weeding and collection development are always political.

It was just sort of like there was this broad swath of what's allowed. It allowed a lot of things, but disallowed others. And that was always, like, in flux. Like, zines and books on Palestine

are obviously going to be targeted at different times. Of course. I've got, like, a few links in here, but, like, there were definitely people who were mad that, like, zines were ending up

in the Barnard Library. zine collection that were like anti-Israel zines and pro-Palestine zines and it's like why are these being put into our library it's like it's a zine library just to make their zines there's a type of person who makes zines typically yeah i mean that's the thing i've noticed with building a zine collection is like you know there's just like a hugely disproportionate amount of anarchist scenes and like it's just i'm not trying to just pick anarchist zines but they're the ones making stuff and they like sharing and so they're free you know like if I had a if I had a zine collection development budget I could buy more zines about people's like favorite dog for two dollars at a time but

that adds up if I'm buying it myself I need the I need a budget also what I've been learning recently is like depending on your how you do like appropriation of funds for collection development like depending on how you buy your zines like if you buy them off Etsy or something Like if you're buying from a distro, you can kind of like have the vendor relationship with the distro. But if you're off Etsy, what if you have to strike up that like vendor relationship connection thing? Like you would for fucking Ingram or something. But usually every single fucking zinster you buy from individually, it's annoying. I'm saying.

Yeah. I mean, that's why it's sort of like chaotic. For me, it's easy because there's like a pedagogical purpose of the collection, which is just to make it the students interested. so it doesn't really matter what I put in there as long as it's enough to get them to go, oh, here's what a zine is. I don't have to keep it up to date and it doesn't have to be comprehensive.

But if I had any more responsibility than that towards it, it would be a problem. I feel like it's the same for you. Like, you're just buying whatever is interesting. Yeah, I mean, we do have a team who does collection development for zines and we do make decisions. We don't necessarily like always look at subjects,

but we'll pick like a, a distro to buy from and then each of us will pick so many titles based on what we think is cool. But like yeah but it's like still because again how do you react to trends?

I'm not going to say where I work but yeah at scale. How do you react to trends? The sort of like buy for your community gets complicated the bigger that because communities are not monolith at any size but once you get to bigger and bigger sizes

it's like kind of incomprehensible. Yeah. I wrote a blog post about weeding one time when I was in grad school. What'd you say? I was going through my inherent contradiction, which I still seemed to not be able to work through. I also interviewed Dr. Knox for it. I talked about weeding and censorship because of I had been volunteering in the University of Illinois's, like LGBTQ resource center, which had its own little library.

And we noticed that there was a copy of the transseual menace in it. Are either of you familiar with what the transsexual menace is. So my reading list. Don't. It's bad. It's the turf book, basically. That's the one that argued that trans lesbians are basically colonizing cis lesbians and also argues heavily for like the medical view of transsexualism.

in a like these people have a disease kind of way. This comes out of the 90s, I believe, like at the height of like political lesbianism or like coming out of that, but also when like trans feminism is starting to get more attention in sort of radical feminist circles because like people like to shit on second wave and I would like to remind everybody

that we would not have a lot of like crucial like black feminist thought and Marxist feminist thought and like third world feminist thought without the fucking second wave like it is not an inherently transphobic school of thought and people need to learn their fucking history they'll sit my ass down now but the transsexual menace comes out of this and it's just bad it's awful and what a great title I am a trans sexual menace, thank you very much. But still, and I noticed we had a copy of it, and we were all like,

why is this here? This doesn't feel like it fits this collection. However, our first reaction was throw it away, burn it, it's an evil book, bad, which it is. But I, like, had the, like, looking at myself having that reaction

to it, not as a person, but as a professional. And then, like, obviously we were going to remove it from the collection. It did not, belong in that collection. But what does it look like to remove it from that collection and why? And I was like having

an existential crisis about this. Like are we getting rid of this just because we think it's transphobic garbage and we think it's bad? Like, is that reason enough to remove it from a queer collection? There are queer people who hold those transphobic views,

right? They suck, but they're there. And I made sure that the university itself had a copy. I like checked the catalog. I was like, we are at an R1 research institution. For whatever reason, people should have access to this book. And in fact, the person who was like the head of that research center was doing writing, like research at the time arguing against that book and stuff. She was like, no, it's important that we have that in the, at the university, like, so that we can argue against it. And then I was like,

oh, and we still took it out of that collection because that wasn't part of the university library. That was just that resource center's library. And so we're like, the one, the university has a copy of this that people can check out. Interlibrary loan exists. But also the scope of this collection is not an academic research focus. It is a support focus.

The focus of the collection was different than an academic libraries. And so I like struggled through, all of that just to get rid of a fucking book I didn't like. This was even before I realized I was trans. But like I wrote a blog post. Yeah, I wrote about this. Overinvested ally. Yeah, I was, I think it was for like the ACL, like new, like the ALA, new members roundtable or something.

And I was one of the bloggers for it. So I wrote that blog post and I also interviewed Emily Knox for that for that. I would say like it's easier if it's like a recognizable book to be like, oh yeah, keep it. Because like I'm weeding right now like a lot of stuff. And it's like, you know, like there's a book I very specifically kept about like it was a homosexual like reference book from 2001. Oh yeah. I just kept because it was funny. I'm sure there's like offensive stuff in it.

But like it had like under transsexual had a definition of pansexual, which under the. entry for transsexual. It's like pansexual is a new term that might supersede transsexual because it was a definition of pansexual that's like never been used. Which was like it's, it's, it was, it was sex, sexual as gender identity. It's basically the way we would use queer, but it's like what if queer was a gender identity and a sexuality identity, but in like, not in the anti-category way that we use queer, but in a category category way. So what if pansexual was just like any non-conforming sexuality, or gender identity.

It was very cool. But then I also was pulling a book that was just like, it was like, you know, remediation effects for mental retardation. I'm like, yeah, it's probably at date. I don't think I need to keep it. There's some people doing research

on the history of, like, the history of science shit, you know? Yeah, and again, like, this is an argument I'm constantly having with like my supervisor. She's like, well, someone could study the history of it. I'm like, we don't have a history PhD program.

One, and two, no one is going to do a history on the on a on a we're not keeping reference material as primary sources in a teaching library and a university that's not an r1 like we're not keeping this so it's like if someone really needs it they can like in our library loan it or probably just buy their own copy if they really need it because they're going to need more than what we have anyway but constantly having to be like saying like you know if something doesn't matter and it's out of date and offensive it's like yeah Who cares?

But if it's like an offensive book that like you can recognize by title alone, it's like, yeah, I can see why you keep it. Like if we have like like, like I get like crack pot books, but we probably have like God and man at Yale, which is definitely out of date and also sucks. But like that's a well-known book. But it complains that like the, you know, the chaplains at Yale are too liberal or whatever in the 1950s. It's like, yeah, sure, whatever. Like, but it's a well-known book. But, you know, I get a book that's like, here's. why Catholicism made Christianity wrong for 1500 years until Martin Luther came along and

and why Catholics are trying to take over America today. Like, we do the book I just found like a bunch of donations that showed up and I'm like, cool. I'd see if it, but every old books wants it. And if not, go in the dumpster or the free book pile. But it's like, yeah, it's a crackpot book. Like, who cares? I'm not going to bother putting it in the collection.

But if it was something that, you know, was, you know, well, well known and in its third edition or whatever, like, yeah, I'd be interested. I'd possibly keep it, but we might already have had a copy. So, yeah, there's like a broad latitude of stuff that you can, that there's, there's a point in keeping. But it's people want to keep, I noticed like there's a tendency among people like, especially librarians to keep stuff like, well, what if we need it? And it's like, what that's way beyond the scope of realistically what our library is expected to do. Well, and I'll see. Like, we're the last one to have it.

Well, and you can always repurchase it too. Like, that's part of the cycle, right? Like we don't think that this is relevant. It's no longer, you know, no longer relevant. We get rid of it. Five years later, it becomes a popular topic and you have to buy newer updated materials for that topic, right? So it's, I don't know. I don't like that, but what if we need an argument?

Because that feeds into the whole libraries or just book repositories, which, you know, we all know is not actually correct. Maybe if we had an actual national library that served as like a repository. So many people think that's the Library of Congress, though. It's not. It's the Library of Congress. Anyway. Right. I mean, they don't think they are a copyright library,

but they don't even get every, I don't even get every. They can't send like a request for stuff, though, to you. Yeah. And be like, give us this. And I had that happen to like some people who were running a journal and they were like, what do we do? I'm like, I don't know, just ignore it. They don't have cops.

Like, they can't send anyone to come get you. The copyright cops. are going to come for you. Hell yeah. Now that's government speed. Yeah. I mean, the day you find out, like, the Library of Congress has a police force is the day you're going to jail.

Because, like, something real bad is that. When you find out a police force exists that you didn't know existed before, like, you're going to jail. It's like, it's like if the U.S. Postal Inspector Police comes to your door, like, like, you're fucked. 99% chance you are going to jail. Wait, they have a, do they have a police force? Yeah.

And they have like a 95% conviction, right? Like, if they come for you, you have fucked up. Because I know that there was like the like, was it like shootings or suicide bonds or something that postal workers used to do? I doesn't have to do that, is it? No, so it's postal inspectors. Yeah. So, like, if you're like, oh, I thought it was like,

are you sending like drugs in the mail? Is that what happened? Doing financial crimes or. Fraud. And then the postal workers come after you? Yeah. The postal police, yeah. For doing fraud?

Some kind of crime. With your mail? I mean. Yeah, male crimes. Aren't you familiar? Male crimes is the same fucking cadence and shape as I rotate it in my head as like car pranks from fucking righteous gymstones. Just do some car pranks. Just doing some male crimes.

I got to look this up, though, because my mom was a postal worker during that time that all of the postal worker jokes were happening because of a couple of shootings. So now I'm like... Of the stuff, yeah. Yeah, like, what would have happened? Like, I never saw a male cop. Did they exist? Anyways, I'm... Malcops now.

Yeah, no, the postal police. I'm choosing to believe that the cops and disco elysium are male cops. They're postal cops. I'm going to make that choice in my head. It supports and protects the United States Postal Service, its employees, infrastructure, and customers by enforcing the laws that defend the United States mail system from illegal and dangerous youth. covers any crimes that may adversely affect or fraudulently use the U.S. United States mail.

So yeah, mail crimes. Yeah, mail theft, mail fraud, and prohibited mailings. Mail crimes. Yeah, if they show up at your door, you're fucked. Don't worry, daddy, just doing some mail crimes. Drug trafficking, including, included. Yeah, they will get you. They're like the Japanese national police.

Like, if they show up at your door, you're going to prison. A hundred percent conviction rate. Now that I didn't know Yeah Because like Japan just like doesn't prosecute crimes a lot But when they do they're like They always get you They're real fucking serious

They only do it when they're sure But anyway Happy five years, you too Yeah Oh holy shit Yeah wow look at us Yep so we've got a bunch of episodes lined up And we've got guests lined up

And But I've been sitting on this one for a while Because I've been thinking about weeding a lot and I've been doing weeding at work. And this case was really weird last year. And I thought it was interesting that the shift in discussion has been around government speech. So I hope this will make library workers think a little more seriously about the things that we've been talking about for years, which is that you are a government employee and you are in this political sphere, whether or not you like it or not.

And to think a little more roundedly about it. Technically, a government employee, think about your role as. as a librarian and whatever kind of library you are, as an agent of social reproduction as like kind of a state or an institutional function. Right? Like when we say like, oh, we're agents of the state, like I don't always literally mean that, but like think about how you reinforce the institution

and its power for which you work, right? Like, and what kind of, yeah. It is nice. You are a type of social reproductive labor. Yeah, it is nice not being a state employee right now, though, because, like, you don't just wake up one morning and, like, another website is just, like, illegal for you to use as a government employee. Like, like, you know, you can't use TikTok anymore. Because when I lived in Texas, there were, like, government employees can't have TikTok accounts. So, like, you can't use TikTok if you're, like, a library.

So, and, like, TikTok wouldn't work on campus or whatever. And, like, Deepseek wouldn't work because it's Chinese controlled. And so, like, Deep Seek would stop working on campus. And they're just, like, things you can't use. And it's kind of nice not having to worry about that. But still, like, even at a private institution, like, there's always going to be some aspect of, like, well, you get government funds. Which is the thing I find interesting about, like, you were talking about the New York Public Library because they're, like, nonprofits. But they still do get funds from the city.

They get funds from the city. And so it's, like, again, like, who's the government speech there? They get less than half of a percent of the budget. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I saw something recently.

We have to get the folks on to talk about that. They sent me an email. But so if they're listening, hi, I saw your email. I'll get to it. We'll have you on. I don't remember which episode was for. The NYC plan folks. Okay.

Yeah. That's one you're working on. It's not my cue. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, happy 2026, everyone. We're back.

We're doing it. We got lots lined up. Justin was just visiting a lot. Yeah. I was having organs removed. Yay. How you doing, Sadie? Doing good.

Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's getting stuff taken out and putting in. Everyone's just being cyborg. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. It happens a lot more in our friend groups and I think the national average. That tracks.

Oh, yeah. I got my cool like corpse nose last year. That was cool. Mm-hmm. That, yeah. It's been so long since we recorded. I forget like what's how. happened since then. I was like, no, that was, that was, we've recorded since then. Yeah, that was

April when I got my, no, June when they got my corpse nose. April was getting, getting fixed. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But. Do I believe that into? What? Getting fixed. Yeah. Okay. So that's how I refer to it. I got fixed. Oh, all right. Good night.