Desperation, love, cars, and song

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I wrote about the “Fast Car” brouhaha involving the Luke Combs cover version two days ago. That sparked further thoughts – thus, this post.]

The strength of the song “Fast Car” is due in no small part to its lyrics’ powerful evocation of hope, desperation, and despair. Sometimes things just don’t work out, even for those who are doing their best to do what’s right. Sometimes the deck really does seem stacked against them – and that’s true whether the song is sung by a black woman back in 1988 or a country-type white guy in 2023.

Some of the lyrics:

You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Any place is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we’ll make something
Me, myself, I got nothing to prove
You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us outta here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won’t have to drive too far
Just ‘cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living

By the song’s end, the singer seems trapped, although of course we don’t know the ultimate trajectory of her life. There’s also this lyric:

So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder…

In America in particular, the car isn’t just a form of transportation. It’s often seen as a way to express oneself, especially for the young, and a means of escape to freedom. Speed is part of this, as is lovemaking – or at least it was back then. The very first kisses, the very first touches, and the very first sex often happened to teenagers in a car.

My second boyfriend, whom I met when I was seventeen, came from a place that was more like the world about which country singer Luke Combs might be singing – rural, depressed, mostly white. It was a world in which the young men all had guns and hunted with them, and they had fast cars or fast motorcycles. At nineteen years of age, my boyfriend had a lot of friends who were already lying in quiet graves, the victims mostly of those fast cars plus alcohol. And the survivors like my boyfriend were already living lives of not-so-quiet desperation.

I had met this boyfriend freshman year at college, and as you might imagine we were a bit of an odd couple. He had somewhat of a Steve McQueen vibe, was smart but troubled, and had earned a scholarship to the far-off college where we’d met. But he didn’t last long there – it was a foreign world to him – and he dropped out just a few months after starting.

He went back to that small town where he’d grown up, and as far as I know he never left. I visited him there briefly a few months after his return home; he’d bought a motorcycle, and we went riding on it. Fast, with my arms wrapped around his waist.

That boyfriend died a long time ago. I know because now and then I’d Google his name, and the only mark he seemed to have made was when he died, because the first sign I ever found of him in all those years was his obituary. It was two sentences long. There didn’t seem to be a family; no wife and children. There was no mention of accomplishments. I don’t know what happened and will never know. But I don’t think it was a happy story.

“Fast Car” makes me think of him.

It also makes me think of another set of lyrics from another great song: Dire Straits’ “Telegraph Road.” It’s a lengthy song that tells some of the story of America’s history. It’s set in Detroit and came out in 1982, a few years before “Fast Car.” Here are the lyrics I’m talking about:

Well, I’d sooner forget, but I remember those nights
Yeah, life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder, you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
But just believe in me, baby, and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights, these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
‘Cause I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again
From all of these signs saying, “Sorry, but we’re closed”
All the way
Down the Telegraph Road

And to put these words I’ve been writing about to the music that goes with them, here’s Tracy Chapman herself singing the original “Fast Car.” She’s got such an evocative voice with that fast vibrato and resonant timbre:

This is Luke Combs’ version, very faithful to the original:

And here’s Mark Knopfler the great, singing about roads, cars, love, and despair in Detroit along Telegraph Road – or anywhere (the part I discussed starts around 7:42, but the whole song is wonderful):

COVID lab leak coverups, then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

From Matt Taibbi:

The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.

As these [COVID lab leak discussion] documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it.

I think I stopped completely trusting scientific authorities quite some time ago, and probably you did, too. And by “quite some time ago” I mean way before COVID.

But in another sense Taibbi is correct about the effect of COVID on my sense of trust, because if I really try to remember my attitude at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, I probably thought that the authorities would be at least a little more honest and forthcoming than they ended up being. However, quite early on I realized something was very amiss, and that there was a lot of panic-stoking going on, both by scientists, journalists, and government officials. It was pretty easy to see just by crunching the illness and death numbers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship – remember that? I do, because I wrote about it at length. I also reflected on those early musings in this post.

And so, because these things were relatively easy to see if a person actually looked at what was happening, I figured some sort of deception plus/or stupidity was going on in a lot of the reporting on COVID.

And what of the lab leak theory? The first mention of the subject I could find on this blog is from April of 2020, which is pretty early. Here’s what I wrote back then:

You may have noticed that I haven’t written much if at all about COVID-19’s origins, despite having written a ton about the disease. Was it from a wet market? Was it from a lab? My opinion was that it was 50/50 and that we just didn’t know, so I didn’t want to waste much verbiage on it.

But now I’m leaning towards the lab theory.

Then I quoted this piece by Jonathan Turley:

When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, China, many people immediately raised the concern that it might have been the result of a lab release from a controversial Chinese the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab was working on coronavirus and had raised concerns over its containment protocols. Then there was the fact that China hid the outbreak, arrested top doctors, and buried research on its origins. However, a narrative quickly emerged in countering President Donald Trump’s references to the “China virus.” People, including members of Congress, who referred to the lab were ridiculed on CNN and other outlets as conspiracy theorists like Politifact declared the theory to be utterly baseless. For some of us, the overwhelming media narrative seemed odd and artificial. It would seem obvious that a lab working on viruses in this area would be an obvious possible source. Now, after weeks of chastising those who mentioned the lab theory, another cache of documents and information shows that there are ample reasons to be suspicious and that concerns were raised two years ago within the State Department.

Turley is not a research biologist, nor am I. But it always was a theory that made sense, and the absolute denial of that theory was always suspicious and seemingly political. One didn’t have to be a scientist to see that – plus, there were other scientists who said that the virus had a structure that made it likely it was the result of bioengineering.

So if reporters were fooled it was because they wanted to be, or were simply stupid, or both. Or perhaps not so many were actually fooled.

But back to the more recent revelations about what was going on among some scientists towards the beginning:

The scientists were far more suspicious of a lab origin than was previously known. The clearest example of this was when Andersen said on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” In fact, the original name of the channel was “project-wuhan_engineering” until February 6, when Andersen changed it to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”

The messages reveal that Andersen still suspected that a lab leak was possible in mid-April, a full month after Nature Medicine officially published “Proximal Origin,” and two months after the authors published a preprint. “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen wrote to his co-authors on April 16. “We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).” As we noted on Tuesday, if Andersen wasn’t convinced that no culturing was possible, why did he rule out “any type of laboratory-based scenario” in his paper?

The scientists attempted to deliberately misdirect a New York Times veteran science journalist, Donald McNeil. When approached by McNeil with questions about a possible lab leak, members of the Slack channel coordinated with each other to lead him away from the theory. “It would be prudent to continue to pre-think responses” to McNeil, Garry suggested. Andersen told his fellow authors that one of his replies to McNeil “includes humor to deflect from the fact that I’m dismissing him.”…

The scientists were responding to “higher-ups.” Although the identities of these “higher-ups” remain to be further investigated, the new documents and Congressional interviews suggest that the “higher ups” may be Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome trust, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, government agencies, and/or the intelligence community.

I haven’t read the source material of the original communications among the scientists, but you can find links to the fuller materials here.

Not really so weird

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “AesopFan” on the thread about the two versions of the song “Fast Car”:

It is profoundly weird that people who claim to be standing up for gays and lesbians are actually the ones erasing the history and achievements of homosexual people.”

It does indeed seem weird, but it’s really not. It’s completely logical and is actually required for leftist activism on certain topics today. It the argument on the left is that bigotry has kept a certain group or groups down in a certain field, and that such bigotry continues to the present day, the existence of earlier achievements by too many members of that group undermines the argument. Oh, one or two might be allowed as stellar examples of success against all odds. But if there are more than those one or two, the whole edifice of the argument begins to collapse.

That phenomenon is also the impetus for the proliferation of fake hate crimes in the last decade or so, although that has a many-decades-long history as well (see Tawana Brawley, for example). Real persecution and real hate crimes – which of course have actually existed and were more numerous historically – don’t need manufacturing.

But the narrative of continuing systemic oppression requires a steady diet of hatred directed at the victim group. If there isn’t enough evidence of that hatred, the evidence must be faked.

What Biden corruption? The IRS whistleblowers, the Democrats, the press, and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden good, Trump bad. That’s all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

So many things have been emerging from the House hearings on the whistleblowers, plus some news on Trump, that I’m just going to do a roundup.

(1) Margot Cleveland discusses the Democrat narratives that attempt to discredit and/or minimize and/or distract from the testimony of the IRS whistleblowers on Biden corruption and FBI and DOJ protection of the Bidens.

(2) Miranda Devine covers the story in the NY Post.

(3) From Jonathan Turley, entitled “‘So Called’ Journalism: NBC Calls the Two Respected IRS Veterans ‘So Called Whistleblowers’”

(4) Here’s Megyn Kelly’s interview with the whistleblowers:

(5) Donald Trump’s Florida trial is scheduled for May 20, 2024. That’s after many of the primaries but not all of them. By that time, Trump may already have the nomination sewn up.

Let’s look behind the headlines about those terrible 83 Republicans who voted against the amendment to rehire pilots fired over refusal to get COVID vaccines

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve often seen it around the blogosphere – the old “uniparty” label for the GOP members of Congress. Here’s a typical treatment of today’s version of the old story (hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes”):

83 Republican congressmen joined nearly every Democrat in Congress to defeat an amendment that would allow airlines to re-hire any pilots that they let go because of the vaccine mandates.

With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

Of course, Democrats are awful. But nearly 100 Republicans also opposed this measure. 83 Republicans are STILL pro-vax mandate.

What a clown world we live in.

When people read that, what do they think? The author seems to be saying that (a) the amendment in question that the 83 GOP members opposed merely would allow airlines to rehire the pilots (b) those who voted against the measure support making vaccines compulsory for pilots; and (c) this represents a “clown world” in which people act like idiots and all is pretense, and the notion that Republicans in Congress represent anything much different from Democrats amounts to belief in one of those pretenses.

When I read the story, I thought: that’s a lot of Republicans. I wonder what they gave as their reason. And so I looked it up, and after about a minute I found this explanation [emphasis mine]:

The U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass an amendment to a bill on Thursday morning that would have required airlines to rehire pilots who were fired or forced to resign for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

Oh; that’s interesting. It would have required their rehiring, not just allowed it.

And in fact, the bill itself (not the amendment that was voted down, but the bill) “includes a prohibition on vaccine and mask mandates on airlines.” Also interesting. Nothing appears to keep airlines from hiring the fired pilots back. The bill passed overwhelmingly without that extra amendment.

But most interesting to me was the following – the reasons some GOP members gave for voting against the amendment:

Both Strong and Rogers, when contacted by 1819 News for comment, suggested that the amendment would offer undue authority to the FAA, which is currently under the control of the Biden administration.

“This Amendment proposed to give the Biden FAA new authority to mandate the hiring practice of airlines,” Strong explained. “Given that woke Washington bureaucrats are already trying to push their DEI policies on airlines hiring, I am concerned it is a slippery slope that would be abused.”

“I cannot support any measure that allows Biden’s FAA to meddle in private sector employment decisions,” Rogers said.

Now, you either buy their reasons or don’t buy them. But I think those condemning them should be aware of their explanation. But I don’t see that sort of evenhanded treatment of the background of the issue from pundits around Twitter and the blogosphere. What I see instead is propaganda.

And I see it often from the right as well as constantly from the left. The message is just a different one. And sometimes – actually, quite often – the propaganda message from the right serves to divide the right – which is not to say that there aren’t some Republicans in Congress who really do seem to be Democrats-lite. But they are nowhere near as numerous as they used to be.

So – propaganda to the left of me, propaganda to the right:

I try to be fair and present a fuller version of the story and let the reader decide. Of course, time constraints and knowledge constraints mean that my efforts never come close to actual fullness. But I certainly try not to just give a kneejerk response.

RIP Tony Bennett

The New Neo Posted on by

He had a long run: 96 years. He kept singing to the end, although he gave up performing in 2021 due to slowly advancing Alzheimer’s.

From his Wiki page, I learned that Bennett was also a lifelong artist. You can see some of his paintings here. Another thing I learned was that Bennett served as an Army infantryman in the European theater during WWII.

His talent showed itself early:

He was the son of grocer John Benedetto and seamstress Anna (Suraci), and was the first member of his family to be born in a hospital. In 1906, John had emigrated from Podargoni, a rural eastern district of the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria. Anna had been born in the U.S. shortly after her parents also emigrated from the Calabria region in 1899…

By age 10 he was already singing, and performed at the opening of the Triborough Bridge, standing next to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia who patted him on the head. Drawing was another early passion of his; he became known as the class caricaturist at P.S. 141 and anticipated a career in commercial art. He began singing for money at age 13, performing as a singing waiter in several Italian restaurants around his native Queens.

Bennett attended New York’s School of Industrial Art where he studied painting and music and would later appreciate their emphasis on proper technique. But he dropped out at age 16 to help support his family. He worked as a copy boy and runner for the Associated Press in Manhattan and in several other low-skilled, low-paying jobs. However, he mostly set his sights on a professional singing career, returning to performing as a singing waiter, playing and winning amateur nights all around the city, and enjoying a successful engagement at a Paramus, New Jersey, nightclub.

Bennett’s career hit a low point during the heyday of the Beatles and other rock or pop groups, but it revived later on and he performed a great deal with new generations of artists.

His signature song, of course:

The revisionist history of the song “Fast Car”

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s come to this:

One recollection that I can confirm with the aid of historical evidence is that [in 1988] ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman was everywhere. I heard it in seedy gay bars, at civil-service leaving dos, at family barbecues. It is one of those songs that announces itself instantly as a classic for the ages. But unlike most songs in that category, it is beguiling in a subtle way. The acoustic guitar riff is simplicity itself, with just a few repeated, easily imitated notes…

It was a multi-platinum international mega-smash hit…

A recent cover of the song by country singer Luke Combs has returned ‘Fast Car’ to public attention. It has spent the past three weeks at the top of the Billboard Country Airplay Chart in the US, and has reached No2 in the Billboard Hot 100.

I remember the song well, too. It was one of those songs that grabbed you immediately – something about Chapman’s voice, as well as the unexpected rhythms of the song, and of course the understated but heartbreaking lyrics. Although Chapman herself was black and perhaps gay (who cared or even knew about the latter?), the song had no color. It was about hope, how love and obligation can tie a person to a life of failed dreams.

Now, a country artist – a white man, since to the left this is highly significant – named Luke Combs has made the song popular again. Cover songs of old hits are ubiquitous and ordinarily non-controversial, but guess what? This one isn’t allowed to stand without the woke crowd creating a fiction about the new version versus the old:

Sadly, in the Great Age of Stupid that we live in, somebody had to say something daft about the cover, to make it all about race and sexuality. Step forward Emily Yahr of the Washington Post. In a tweet announcing her article, she wrote: ‘As Luke Combs’s hit cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” dominates the country charts, it’s bringing up some complicated emotions in fans and singers who know that Chapman, as a queer black woman, would have an almost zero chance at that achievement herself.’

There is so much wrong in this tweet. For one thing, the fact that the original version is very clearly not a country song, and that Chapman is not a country artist, seems to have passed Yahr by entirely…

The article is on an even stickier wicket when it comes to Chapman’s sexuality. It tells us that Chapman ‘does not discuss her personal life’. Nevertheless, Yahr feels perfectly entitled to do so based on hearsay. She is also blasé about pigeonholing Chapman with the ridiculous word ‘queer’.

Worse still, the thrust of the Washington Post article more or less erases Chapman’s huge success in the 1980s, implying that being a black lesbian thwarted her ambitions. Back in the real world, Chapman was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year for ‘Fast Car’ (Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ beat her to those, somewhat incredibly). She won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist.

Oh, it’s just us old folk who remember. Yahr herself seems rather young, if you go to her Twitter page. The young seem increasingly willing to just make stuff up and ignore history, even recent pop song history, in order to make some sort of leftist point about racism or another “ism.”

Some of the replies there are as follows:

“Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman was nominated for 3 Grammy Awards including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. She won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist.

She has 7 other nominations for Grammy Awards and two wins.

Never heard of Luke Combs but remember when Tracy’s Album blew up. I tend to listen to metal and I could still sing every word of her song to this day. But I guess that doesn’t make for much of a grievance story.

At this point, I think these “journalists” simply write these stories for the sake of controversy. They spend no time bothering to research the actual topic and instead pretend history doesn’t exist prior to today.

How old are you? This song was top of the charts when it came out and is STILL iconic to Gen X. Sad commentary from you.

Darius Rucker is black and is quite popular in country…

Are you serious.

Tracy Chapman absolutely crushed it with this song.

I still hear it all the time.

I think your editor should be fired for letting you do this story.

I know, right? It’s not like a Black woman could ever do a cover of a country song and have it blow up to be a worldwide hit!

“AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIYEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUU…”

It just goes on and on like that, and I see no retraction or contrition from Yahr or the “democracy dies in darkness” WaPo – and come to think of it, isn’t that WaPo slogan racist?

Your children belong to the schools, where their trans status will be kept secret from parents

The New Neo Posted on by

Children used to be taught that it was a danger sign if anyone asked them to keep something a secret, especially if that “something” was related to sex. And children were taught that they shouldn’t keep secrets, either.

Now that’s so 20th Century – at least in many states. To take some examples:

There’s New York [emphasis mine]:

The New York State Education Department released guidance Monday to advise schools on how to create “affirming” environments for transgender children, suggesting that teachers keep students’ gender transitions a secret from their parents.

School systems should not use the student’s transgender name with their parents, unless the child advises otherwise according to the New York guidance. The student is the only one who knows if it is “safe” to come out to their parents and the first thing educators should ask a transgender student is how they can help them through their transitioning process, the guidance states.

“Some TGE [transgender and gender expansive] students have not talked to their families about their gender identity because of safety concerns or lack of acceptance and may begin their transition at school without parent/guardian knowledge,” the guidance states. “Only the student knows whether it is safe to share their identity with caregivers, and schools should be mindful that some TGE students do not want or cannot have their parents/guardians know about their transgender status.”

Extraordinary abrogation of parental rights concerning a minor child, with the school in collusion with the child to keep the secret. And yet typical, and not just in blue states:

At least 168 districts governing 5,904 schools nationwide have rules on the books that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing to parents a student’s gender status without that student’s permission, according to a list compiled by the conservative group Parents Defending Education and shared with The Post.

The 3,268,752 students affected by such policies go to class in all kinds of districts — large and small, affluent and poor, urban and rural, red and blue — stretching from North Carolina to Alaska.

The non-comprehensive list includes two of the largest school districts in the country, Chicago Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified School District — along with other city jurisdictions like DC Public Schools, Baltimore City Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, Portland Public Schools, and Seattle Public Schools.

Districts from deep-blue university towns — Berkeley and Palo Alto, Calif.; New Haven, Conn.; Iowa City, Iowa; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Hanover, NH; Durham, NC; and Madison, Wis. — appear on the list, as do 11 districts in deep-red Idaho, 16 in purple Pennsylvania and seven in Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected in 2021 in part on a platform of giving parents a bigger say in their children’s education.

I doubt that most parents are even aware of these general policies, either. The whole thing is somewhat of a stealth operation, although it’s been getting more publicity over time.

Here’s an article about the situation in Idaho.

And here’s a recent one that is quite comprehensive:

Districts are using legal theories pushed by activist groups like the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Among the most important are that children have a federally guaranteed right to privacy from their parents in school, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes children’s right to transition without the consent or knowledge of their parents, and that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects transgender students from the “harassment” of school districts “outing” them to non-compliant parents. The Title IX theory, the most chilling, is supported by the radically progressive notion that parents represent a danger to the welfare of transgender children until they prove otherwise by providing “affirmation.”

School districts that buy into these theories are not merely embracing the idea that hiding children’s gender transitions from their parents is legal, but that divulging the information without the child’s consent is illegal and possibly perilous to the student’s safety. In Dover, Pennsylvania, for example, a mother of a middle school student castigated a local school board after discovering that school staff had been addressing her 12-year-old daughter with male pronouns for a year. School officials even sent the child to a hospital for an evaluation without informing the parents. When the mother confronted the school board, she was told that there was a law against informing her.

Once again, we see the work of activist groups that for a while have flown under the radar while they helped changed policies all over the country. In some states, legislative bodies have enacted or are attempting to enact laws that make such secrecy illegal, although (and I can’t find the link at the moment) some school districts are defying the laws and continuing to secretly transition students.

If parents are actually abusive about this or any issue, there have been longstanding mechanisms in place in all states to deal with that. In these trans student situations, however, the secrecy policies have no requirement to prove or even to allege that parental abuse has occurred. A child’s request – a child’s failure to explicitly give permission for any reason – is enough to cause the secret-keeping. The child and the school are in collusion to keep a secret – a very big secret indeed, with major repercussions – from the parent.

It’s astounding that this is happening, but it’s really just part of a continuum of moves by which the left is increasingly taking on the task of child-rearing and indoctrination. The number of teachers and administrators who are fine with these policies, or go along with them out of fear, is extraordinary. And the number of Democrat state legislators who think it’s a great idea is enormous.

The left seems so confident that the secrets public schools keep will only be kept from those awful parents on the right. And so they don’t see a policy like that ever coming back to bite them. They expect to be in control forever, so it’s okay to take rights – or children – from conservatives. And in a state such as California, failure to affirm is increasingly defined as a form of child abuse; I’ve already written about that here as well as here.

The Marxist librarian

The New Neo Posted on by

I missed this story back when it first happened, in April of 2022. This explains what I’m referring to:

A large organization that drives the training of U.S. librarians and their use of public funds has chosen a self-described “Marxist lesbian” as its next president amid growing concern about libraries actively connecting children to sexually explicit activities and materials.

Her name is Emily Drabinski, and she won the election 5,410 votes to 4,622. I mention that because apparently the organization has 54,000 members, consisting of “librarians, libraries, library graduate schools, members of library boards and associations, and library students.” If in fact they all get to vote, most of them certainly did not, because the total participation was a little under 19%, and Drabinski’s share amounted to 10% of the total membership.

I couldn’t care less if Drabinski is a lesbian; I care that she’s a Marxist, and I care that she’s an activist who supports the following:

In a TV interview with a Boise station last week about her ALA election, Drabinski conveyed surprise at public concerns about libraries making pornographic materials available to children and buying them with taxpayer resources.

“It’s like concerted political efforts to sort of push this, sort of story about what libraries do which seems very, you know, it’s anathema to what libraries actually do, that we are, sort of pushing pornographic materials on our patrons and it’s really not what we do at all,” she claimed. “…There’s no big library agenda.”

Contrary to her claims in that interview, however, Drabinski’s other YouTube videos are replete with teaching other librarians how to “subvert” and inject hard-left politics and sexuality into their publicly funded work. For one example, consider one of many such lectures she gave to other librarians on July 6, 2021, titled “Teaching the Radical Catalog.”

In the lecture, Drabinski discussed her homosexual coming out experience and how saturating in a campus environment of proliferating sexual identities changed how she approaches being a librarian. At her first librarian job, “At Sarah Lawrence, absolutely everybody was queer. … There were so many ways to be gay. … And it was my job to teach those students how to find themselves in our library catalog,” she said. She described queering the library as “critical thinking” and “thinking critically about the catalog.”

Here’s a slide from that presentation showing the sexuality sections of the Library of Congress catalog. In it, you can see the Closed Captioning of what Drabinski is saying while showing the slide, which includes affirming the idea that “queerness includes the subversion of those kinds of normal family types.” She’s referring to the family types that naturally produce children — i.e. a married man and woman…

“We can equip our students with the capacity to wring what they need out of library structures, and wringing what you need out of systems that exclude you is a necessary life skill for survival and revolution,” she concluded in her talk. “And we can also help build a way of shaping students as agents of change both inside the library and out.”

Much much more at the link.

The reason Drabinski’s name has come up recently is that recently the Montana librarians have said “enough”:

The Montana State Library Commission voted Tuesday to withdraw from the American Library Association (ALA) because of its self-described “Marxist lesbian” president.

“Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” reads part of the letter the Montana commission voted to send to the ALA.

In a 5-1 vote, with one member abstaining, the commission voted to immediately separate from the national library group…

And Idaho may follow:

“Drabinski has said in interviews that librarians aren’t focused on assisting minors in accessing pornography, but her writings and public presentations reveal that she has dedicated her professional career to precisely that while using taxpayer resources,” they wrote. “Drabinski proposed using ‘queer theory’ to guide the way books are cataloged in libraries.”

Drabinski proposed doing so in a 2013 paper at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Idaho lawmakers also complained “the ALA has provided LGBT resources and pressured libraries to include explicit materials on transgenderism and sexual deviance targeting young children.”