201: Librarians Are Not Groomers (w/Heath Umbreit)
When Moms For Liberty attacks libraries with demands to ban books about MLK Jr and age-appropriate sex education, and claims that librarians are grooming their children into the trans agenda, they’re enacting the worst forms of neo-fascist bullying. But they’re also paradoxically defending a troubled American legacy against a librarian culture attempting to course-correct towards greater inclusion.
To discuss this problem, Matthew talks to Heath Umbreit, a reference librarian who works at a public library in the northeastern U.S. Mis- and disinformation has been a professional and personal interest of theirs for several years; Heath's study of the phenomenon focuses on a critical examination of popular narratives about disinformation, the concept of epistemic supremacy, and the ways in which information and disinformation intersect with systemic power differentials in American society.
Show Notes
Derek gives the Keynote Address at the 2023 Oregon Library Association's Annual Conference
Library Bill of Rights | Advocacy, Legislation & Issues
Students, authors fight censorship in PA schools
Kuo & Marwick, "Critical Disinformation Studies"
Morales & Williams, "Moving Toward Transformative Librarianship: Naming and Identifying Epistemic Supremacy"
danah boyd, "You Think You Want Media Literacy... Do You?"
PEN America, 2023 Banned Books Update: Banned in the USA
Kelly Jensen, Trauma, Book Bans, and Libraries: A Resource Guide for Library Workers, Library Supporters, and Beyond
Kristen Browde, Who's Making News for Sex Crimes Involving Children?
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the broadest terms, I think that libraries are flawed, human institutions that nevertheless have a radically
aspirational goal at their core.
♪♪ ♪♪
♪♪ Hey, everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we
investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual
influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, we can add to that tagline that maybe the toughest disinformation fighter in your town is your local librarian.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Conspiracuality 201.
Librarians are not groomers.
With Heath Umbright.
Thank you.
Quote, books and other library resources should be protected for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves.
Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.
Unquote.
So that's Article 1 of the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights, first adopted in 1939, three and a half months before the eruption of World War II.
It's a stately document that rhymes with every classic American humanist aspiration.
And yet, as our guest Heath Umbright informs us today, those values have long been betrayed by the blind spots of American empire.
Which lives on in stories of superiority and exclusion.
So when Moms for Liberty attacks libraries with demands to ban books about Martin Luther King Jr.
and age-appropriate sex education and claims that librarians are grooming their children into the trans agenda, they are enacting the worst forms of neo-fascist bullying.
But They are also paradoxically defending a troubled American legacy against a librarian culture attempting to course correct towards greater inclusion.
We've talked about covering libraries for a while.
One of the greatest things that I think in my adult life my wife and I got into when we were living in Los Angeles was getting our library cards again because I didn't take advantage of that that much when I lived in New York City, but growing up I did.
The downtown Los Angeles library is gorgeous.
If you live there, you should definitely go.
And now living in Portland, there is a new library branch opening two blocks from my house, so I will be getting my card and returning there as well.
That's great.
Yeah, one of the nicest requests I've had since we've started this podcast was being asked to give the keynote address at the 2023 Oregon Libraries Association's annual conference.
I'll post a link in the show notes if anyone is interested, but speaking in front of 350 librarians from across the state, I got to talk about our work combating misinformation, and of course we do it in podcast form, but as I stated early on in the talk, these librarians are the people on the front line of so many culture war issues, and they have to deal, often unfairly, with the rhetoric and vitriol of a very uninformed public, many people who are swayed by groups like Moms4Liberty.
But let's face it, you don't become a librarian if you don't love books, and you kind of have to be well-read to do that job, which means you've likely been exposed to an array of knowledge and a whole set of different and often competing ideas.
Now the word library comes from a Latin root meaning book or document, while in ancient Greek bibliotheca, the word means book container.
And the idea was to store books and documents, but also let's face it, ideas, in one central place and to let the learned, well at least at first the learned people, and eventually the general public, As more people learn to read, have access to that knowledge, assess it, and come to their own understanding of these ideas.
So, the library is a really important institution in any society, which is why colonizing forces from the ancient times to this very day will try to destroy libraries.
Now, the Taliban has been destroying libraries this day across Afghanistan if they don't comply with Hanifa jurisprudence or if the books contained in those libraries or the librarians themselves speak poorly of their brand of Islam in any way.
Now, here in America, we have similar efforts going on with Christian nationalist groups.
Maybe not the same level of terror, but the way that some of these groups have been infiltrating school board meetings, there is some level of terror that is involved.
Let's be honest, librarians have their biases.
My wife was in the crowd for my talk last year, and she noticed two or three people get up and leave early in my talk when I mentioned anti-vaxxers.
Correlation or causation?
You know, full bladders or maybe did you wear a Mets cap or something like that?
I actually don't wear a cap when I speak in public.
So, librarians have diverse views.
Now, the library is a symbol of our higher learning, even if we walk around with thousands of libraries worth of information in our pockets these days.
But to me, that symbol still matters.
And to many people, the buildings themselves still really matter.
Yeah, they really do.
And our guest is going to unpack that for us at length today.
And for me, the library is kind of a core memory.
I wouldn't say it's symbolic for me because, I mean, my dad was a librarian in a Catholic girls' high school for decades.
He's retired now.
But when I was a kid and there was a PA day, he'd bring me to work and I would like moon around in his office while this steady stream of students would come to the desk and ask him for guidance.
And I didn't know what they were asking about, what they were trying to research or whatever.
But I do remember my dad thoughtfully showing them the card catalog back when those were a thing, helping each student navigate the shelves.
But the strongest memory I have was this feeling that the person was permitted to consider possibilities.
You know, the feeling was, well, this book is a good introduction to this history, but it's a little outdated.
This author takes another perspective, and this writer argues that the whole way of doing history should be reconsidered.
And, you know, all of this was very much in line with my dad's historian personality.
Like, there's always this feeling of yes and also, because every conversation with him unpacks many angles on, you know, whatever it is.
And I have to say that as I get older, I feel more of that within me.
I'm not as quick in my decisions and opinions.
I've come to expect that I should be surprised by new things, that there's yet another book about that thing out there, and that it ultimately feels good to have my assumptions challenged.
But not everyone has that library experience or wants it, frankly.
Oh, you mentioned card catalogs.
I have many quirks, but one of them is I really hate people who don't put the shopping carts back in the grocery store, or at least put them, they just leave them by their cars.
And growing up, I used to go with my mom food shopping all the time.
And when people didn't shelve things correctly, I, while she was shopping, I would be stocking the shelves in the right order.
Well, that also happened in the library because if I'd find books filed in the wrong place, I would then go and move them.
Oh man.
And I know that's my own mental thing, but that is very much part of my library experience growing up, is just getting mad at people.
So it's kind of like, I'm not just a grumpy middle-aged man, I was a grumpy kid too in that respect.
But also cleaning up the world, like right from the jump, right?
Like putting things back in order, making sure that everything was properly placed.
Yeah, that's right, man.
It's just this quirk.
I think it led to my career in writing, to be honest, because just of how I view words and how things need to be structured in a certain way, that is very much part of my lived experience as well.
Yeah.
Back to Moms4Liberty, I'm going to give a brief rundown in a moment because they are the group that's leading the book banning charge in America.
Now, in 2023, more than 3,000 books were banned in this country, which is 1,000 more than the previous year.
I put that one in one bucket because another is the fact that libraries are a social service, and the right loathes social services, even when they take advantage of them.
We see it all the time when governors take federal money, even as they talk about the devilish Biden administration, for example.
So, besides the ability to check out books for free, libraries offer classes, internet access, public bathrooms, sometimes even just a warm place to hole up for hours without an expectation that you have to be a patron to purchase anything.
Which often means that unhoused people take advantage of these spaces.
And that's an important taxpayer-funded service, because everyone deserves access to knowledge, but they also deserve access to things like toilets and heat and air conditioning.
Now, Mothers for Liberty, or Moms for Liberty, was founded in January 2021 by three Florida women, Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Bridget Ziegler.
The first two are former school board members, and when founded, Bridget was actively on a school board.
Her husband, Christian, later served as the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, though he lasted under a year in that role because he was accused of rape and sexual assault.
He had made plans with his wife, Bridget, and another woman to be in a threesome, but Bridget backed out at the last moment and Christian showed up anyway.
Sex lives are sex lives and that's all fine, but what happened next is really disturbing because Christian was kicked out of his chairmanship by his own party for the accusations by a vote of 199 to 3.
You know those good old Christian, literally, values the right love so much.
Well, you know, we could recommend some really good books that help people who are confused and exploring their sexuality, but I think, you know, they could be banned, right?
Oh, that would definitely be banned by them.
So, Moms for Liberty was labeled a far-right extremist organization by the Sovereign Poverty Law Center in 2023.
Now, while the group formed to fight COVID mandates around masks and vaccines, they quickly expanded their goals to push back against Critical race theory, DEI, LGBTQ rights, and gender theory of any kind.
And they certainly struck a nerve in conservative circles.
By July 2023, they had 285 chapters in 45 states.
They've also hosted numerous fundraisers with people like Megyn Kelly being featured, and they've received sponsorships from groups like the Heritage Foundation, which makes sense given how much Moms4Liberty messaging aligns with Project 2025's Christian nationalistic goals, as well as Moms4Liberty supporting Heritage's notion The Heritage Foundation's idea of education freedom, which as Julian and I covered on Monday's bonus episode, is just another way of diverting public funds into paying for Christian schooling through voucher programs.
So there are many layers going on with this group.
But Moms4Liberty's main passion and their main marketing technique is banning books.
In 2021, they tried to ban the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to attend a formerly whites-only school in 1960 when she was 6.
If you've never seen footage or photographs from a little girl being yelled at by a bunch of old white people, it's really disturbing, but she broke through that barrier.
And they've also tried to ban any book that teaches about the civil rights movement.
So they are very much part of the, whites are discriminated against in American noise that just will not die down.
Now, members of their chapters have been accused of harassing librarians and public school teachers, as well as entire school boards.
From there, Moms4Liberty really honed in on LGBTQ rights, taking advantage of the moral panics around trans issues.
Most of their recent work has been in banning books that include any topics or images of sex across any sort of sexual preference, as well as any book that includes the mention of gender identity.
Yeah, and we can get really specific with an example here.
In January of this year, Libs of TikTok posted decontextualized screenshots of five pages from a 230-page book called Let's Talk About It!
The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan.
So this is a book that Moms4Liberty has been targeting all over the country.
Chaya Rejcik was outraged that it was available in a public school library system in Wisconsin, and she described the images that she posted as extremely graphic.
But what I saw were empathetically drawn cartoon figures of diverse people discussing the pros and cons of pornography and masturbation with anatomical close-ups for different techniques.
So, of course, I went out and bought the book, and it's actually really beautiful.
It's hard to imagine, actually, how much less shameful and anxious my own youth might have been with a sex-positive resource like this, and also what it would have done to my natal racism, misogyny, and ableism, just things that were in the water as I'm growing up.
And I think if you have teens, I'm not going to suggest an age because every teen and every family is different, If you feel you know someone who would benefit from a qualified third-party discussion of sexual facts and ethics, I'd highly recommend going to your local bookstore and thumbing through this book to see if it's a fit.
It opens with long narrative and dialogue sections, cartooned with interesting, funky characters talking about why it's important to have good information and open communication about sex within youth culture, and why every consideration of sexual activity really has to be grounded in the ethics of relationship.
Raychick and Moms for Liberty aren't interested in any of that.
The hand-drawn images of genitalia and two characters having sex that she splashes all over the internet, they start on page 107 of 230.
After long conversations between characters in the book, Who come in all shapes and sizes and colors and abilities about sexuality and gender, different body types, body image, body dysmorphia, transgenderism, transgender identity and consent.
And, you know, these are best practices in sex education that Raychick just chits on with her posts.
Now, the outcome is that Raychick basically sends a troll army after this little school district in Wisconsin.
It's just 85 miles east of Madison, by saying that the book was, quote, available to middle school kids at Oak Creek Franklin Joint District School.
Quote, she says, this is what they're giving 11-year-olds to read in schools, unquote.
Now, I tried to fact check this by contacting Oak Creek Franklin, which is a district, not a school, With two middle schools and a high school, and I wrote to the principals of each, all three principals, and they didn't get back to me, but I wasn't surprised because a lot of school admins who have been targeted by this sort of trolling just really want the issue to go away.
But I'm pretty sure that Raychick didn't fact check which of those three libraries the book was shelved in, and in any case, A book on a shelf is not, quote, giving the book to 11-year-olds, unquote, any more than a bookstore that sells The Joy of Sex on the same floor as Barney Books is giving sex books to children.
But, you know, just to zoom out on this a little bit, everyone is allowed to have feelings about books, but what Moms for Liberty wants their constituents to believe is that their feelings are the right feelings for everyone, And that age-appropriate book-buying decisions for school libraries are rigged somehow to corrupt the children, instead of being actually governed by a democratic process informed by educational and literary experts, which kind of rolls out in the same vein in which all school curricula is formed, through scholarship that focuses on cognitive and developmental psychology, plus parental input and feedback.
So, it's like a shared, collaborative process.
It's not unlike decisions made in the public health sphere.
The oversight or overlooking of those facts is part of the irony of Moms4Liberty.
So is the fact that someone involved, her husband, gets accused of sexual misconduct is another irony.
Yes, they want their feelings to be the right ones.
They want their religion and their metaphysics to be the right one.
And there's another irony.
Because Moms4Liberty continually screams about children needing critical thinking skills, yet that involves being exposed to a broad range of ideas and coming to your own conclusions, as I said earlier, and they do not want that.
They want a particular form of Christian nationalist education to be implemented in public schools, or ideally, that public school money to flow into voucher programs for Christian-specific schools.
And you can easily view this in the Moms4Liberty program, which is called Moms4Libraries.
Now, while most of their media time is spent yelling about what books to ban, they do actually offer replacements, meaning what books they think children should be learning from.
So, I spent some time going through those pages on their website.
Oh, dear.
The program itself is pretty ambiguous.
You have to contact, quote, your local Moms4Liberty chapter to learn how to distribute books and get them placed in classrooms.
Yet, they feature seven literacy partners that they work with as listed on their website, and I'm going to bullet point and go through them right now.
So, you have Brave Books, which was founded by a man named Trent Talbot, And he quit his career in ophthalmology to start this publishing house in order to stop the progressive agenda by promoting wholesome books that quote, celebrate families and honor traditional values.
So he's an eye doctor.
Yeah.
He was an eye doctor.
Yes.
Okay.
Their tagline is Pro-God, Pro-America children's books.
And their authors include General Michael Flynn, the anti-vax rapper Zuby, Dinesh and Debbie, his wife D'Souza, Kirk Cameron, Sean Spicer, and conspirituality favorite J.P.
Sears.
Okay, then you have the Tuttle Twins, whose website leads with the important question, are your kids being brainwashed?
So after a long screed on their site about woke activism dominating schools, Tuttle Twins guarantees that they publish the only books that teach kids critical thinking skills, which results in them learning things like Why a free market economy is the greatest way to lift people out of poverty and allow people to trade with one another.
How property rights allow us to decide what's best for us and how to make decisions for our families somehow.
They also tackle scary socialism by explaining what it really is, I'm sure they're on point with that, and why it's so destructive to our freedoms and well-being.
You know, I just want to note that people should check out the QAnon Anonymous Premium Episode 234 on the Tuttle Twins, because Liv Agar does this great job on both the books, but also talks about how they're the backbone for a very melted TV show.
YouTube show, rather.
Yeah, it's just incredible that people who say that their books teach critical thinking is the exact opposite of that skill set.
Let's move on.
Publisher number three, Classical Historian, which bills itself as teaching a Socratic discussion of history.
I notice this very often with these self-led schools that are actually Christian schools in disguise.
They talk about the Socratic method.
We're going to lead your children to the right places.
And Classical Historian publishes a series of history games.
And you might not be surprised to learn that history, at least from the titles and courses they offer, only matters if taught from a Western perspective.
They also promise to teach the true history of America.
Then you have Heroes of Liberty, which is a publisher that only publishes certainly unbiased biographies of who they consider to be Western heroes.
You have Ronald Reagan and John Wayne and Rush Limbaugh, Benjamin Netanyahu, Clarence Thomas, John Paul II, and of course, they have a biography of Elon Musk.
Pretty sure it's not authorized, but that's in there.
Then you have probably my favorite, which is The Great Battles for Boys, and they focus on boys ages 8 to 12 by publishing thrilling military history.
Now, they have a book on the American Civil War, and they offer a sample chapter, which you know I had to read.
I did a short video on social media about this last week.
Here's the first line of the second paragraph of the book.
No single event triggered this war.
Right.
So yeah, that's something that's very common in Christian nationalist circles in America, that slavery wasn't really the problem here.
And it gets better.
So, quote, In the beginning, American slavery included both white and black people.
The white people were often criminals or poor people who needed to pay off their debts.
The black people came from Africa.
That's a way to frame it.
They were kidnapped by their fellow Africans and sold to white slave traders who then shipped them by the thousands to places such as the United States.
These kidnapped Africans were then sold to the highest bidder.
Some of them later earned their freedom after working for a certain number of years.
This is what Moms for Liberty wants people to learn, straight up.
And that chapter then states that slavery would have likely ended without a war.
Kind of like the whole polio would have ended without vaccine.
You can see these repetitive tropes that exist within this sort of corner of America.
And they also said that slavery was one issue that led to the Civil War.
And reminder, this is what they desire our children to learn.
They have two more publishers.
American Cornerstone Institute, which was founded by neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate Ben Carson.
They only published one book, which is called Why America Matters.
It's by Carson and Valerie Funstein, and it focuses on America's Judeo-Christian values.
And finally, Good & True Media, which is a Christian publisher that believes children should not be taught they are the center of the universe.
Well, unless they are still fetuses.
Or, unless they're baby Jesus, who is destined to be murdered while his Heavenly Father looks on.
I'm very confused, Derek, by that.
Children should not be taught they're the center of the universe.
So, because that's just permissive parenting, because children are getting away with everything, they're running our lives, we're letting them decide everything, I suppose, is really bad.
And I also have a feeling that that leads to the children need to be disciplined more sort of ethos that exists, which brings up a whole other set that we're not even going to discuss today.
So our guest today, Heath Umbright, picks up on a really strong impulse here, which is There's a desire to maintain the illusion that everything is just fine.
You know, America doesn't have a racist past or present.
Founders were Christians.
Queer people are some sort of recent abomination.
Feminists are wrong about power.
Good things come from colonialism.
Guns don't kill people.
Capitalism is ordained by God.
But I would say, too, that the illusions can also be forward-looking, whitewashing what's coming.
And especially when that centers on climate catastrophe, I get really upset.
There's a story out of Pennsylvania last year about a school district that canceled a book event under pressure That's centered on a young adult novel by a guy named Alan Gratz.
It's called Two Degrees.
Now, this book has not yet been a Moms4Liberty target, but it's in that ballpark.
And this one really gets me, because I have an 11-year-old who, several times a week, is going to ask things like, do you think that governments will actually do anything about carbon, or are they just going to let us cook?
And I look at him and I say, I really don't know, buddy.
Like, I feel overwhelmed by that same question.
But I don't, like, leave it hanging there.
I say, I don't know how to answer it, partly because I'm not an expert.
I know there are a lot of really smart people working on this problem.
There are scientists, psychologists, economists, policy people.
So that's a librarian's answer.
That's my dad, I think.
And I think it's harder as an answer than shutting down the question, but I think in the end that shutting down the question, like, really only shuts down the person.
I don't think you need to be an expert to understand historical patterns, though.
And sadly, I hope the librarian's answer is right, that the smart people working on it will eventually break through.
But the reality is that humans have generally been reactive, not proactive.
And especially when capitalism is involved and capital is to be had, it's really difficult.
My wife and I have been watching season two of Treme, which I never got to back in the day when it was on.
You just see the shock doctrine living out in that series in New Orleans, and you just realize that the reactivity generally always wins, and I hope that's not the case.
So, moving into this interview, big picture.
What the seven publishers that I've laid out all have in common is a very heterosexual, very religious, very white retelling of history, as well as the present because, of course, as it goes, If you control the past, you control the future, and that's what they're trying to get adopted into curriculum.
And nothing will create generations of unprepared children to understand what the world like this is in this sort of isolationist, bigoted curriculum that they're trying to put forward.
It's going to have consequences on the types of people that it creates.
And if you want to create a recipe for fascism, this is your reading list.
But it absolutely does not honor the original intention of the Symbols of the Library, which is a place for the inquisitive mind to enter and be exposed to a range of ideas.
And without that sort of education, we're failing children by refusing to provide them access to an entire world of ideas which, again, they have on their phone and they can have in social places like libraries.
That's really dangerous for American society and it's really sad that given the free flow of
information that's available to us right now, certain people like Moms for Liberty
is constantly trying to stop that flow.
Okay, so here's my conversation with Heath Umbright, a reference librarian who works at
at a public library in the Northeastern United States.
They have worked in libraries since 2011.
Mis- and disinformation has been a professional and personal interest of theirs for several years.
Heath's study of the phenomenon focuses on a critical examination of popular narratives about disinformation.
The concept of epistemic supremacy and the ways in which information and disinformation intersect with systemic power differentials in American society.
Heath is a non-binary trans person and uses they-them pronouns.
Heath Umbright, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.
I'm really excited to be here.
In our intro to this interview, we will have covered the Library Bill of Rights, by which the American Library Association for about 85 years has framed your discipline in a radically American humanist mode focused on The freedom to become informed and enlightened regardless of age, orientation, or religious belief.
Now, in practice, it's not always true to form, but in the broadest terms, how do you view your vocation in light of this history?
In the broadest terms, I think that libraries are flawed human institutions that nevertheless have a radically aspirational goal at their core.
Many people have observed, and I think that this is true, that if libraries didn't exist and someone were to propose the concept of a library today, it would be ridiculed as some woke socialist agenda and shot down immediately.
Libraries aspire to be embedded community centers where literally anytime that we're open, anyone can come in, access and use resources ranging from books to computers to community spaces and more, All for free and with as minimal limitations as possible.
Now, at this point in time, I think libraries are at an interesting, complicated inflection point.
We have one subset of people who feel a great deal of nostalgic attachment to the library that they remember from their own childhoods, but who haven't necessarily updated their understanding of what libraries do now.
So they underestimate or they're surprised by the roles that we play in a society with both an increasingly diverse multicultural population, and an increasingly intense right-wing backlash to anything or anyone attempting to serve or even acknowledge that population.
And then there's a different subset of people who are under the impression that libraries are obsolete or becoming obsolete.
And in my experience, that perception is mostly coming from people with the privilege not to need the library themselves, But over the course of time, we've seen a gradual but continuous weakening of the social safety net.
And now more than ever, libraries have become one of the few institutions filling in the gaps for people in need.
Perceptions to the contrary, not everyone has access to a computer or even to a stable internet connection, and libraries provide that.
And like I said earlier, you know, libraries are one of the only public places that you can go where you have climate controlled shelter, free access to restrooms, all sorts of resources, and you can just be for hours at a time without having to justify yourself or spend money.
And then finally, we've seen in the past few years that libraries have become a huge target in the so-called culture wars.
Like many people in other professions, librarians have started to grapple with the realization that, for all of our radical aspirations, libraries, too, are a product of and built in the image of the same white supremacist structures that occur throughout American society.
As part of that, we're reexamining our services and policies and making efforts to see and serve the parts of our communities that we've neglected in the past.
That's LGBTQ plus people, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, speakers of other languages, and the list just goes on.
And reactionaries who are invested in maintaining white supremacy, in part by suppressing information that would help to reveal and dismantle white supremacy on a larger scale, have noticed.
They don't like it, and so they've launched this multi-pronged attack on libraries and librarians in an attempt to get us to fall back in line.
Many of the reactionaries that you speak of actually mobilize a mantra that's kind of paradoxical in relation to the function of libraries socially.
They will often say that they want to do their own research.
I mean, this is what libraries are for.
And so, how are you and your colleagues navigating that kind of language, that kind of parody of the librarian's mission?
What I want to point out first is that doing research isn't just going out and finding someone on the internet who agrees with you.
That's not hard.
The internet is huge, and anyone with a computer and an internet connection can publish anything that they want, right?
The most critical part of doing research means cultivating the skill to discern between reliable and unreliable information, and that's what librarians are trained to do.
For me, as a reference librarian, doing research is also notably a process that's grounded first and foremost in curiosity.
The goal is open-minded discovery.
It's something that, in my opinion, shouldn't be grounded in fear, anxiety, or oppositionalism.
And, you know, the minute someone embarks on research from an anxious or competitive mindset, trying to prove their existing suspicions, that muddies the process because they in some way believe that they already know what the answer is.
And when you come into the process with a preset answer in mind, it makes it much, much harder to find, evaluate, and interpret information accurately.
Especially information that doesn't agree with your pre-existing sense of the correct answer.
What you believe about a subject will shape which search terms you use, which in turn will shape the results that you get back.
It will shape the data that you consider compelling versus the data that you gloss over or dismiss, as well as the researchers that you trust or not, regardless of their qualifications or lack thereof.
And that's to say nothing of the algorithms that people in the do-your-own-research crowd are consciously or unconsciously engaging with.
I think another important part of doing research is the doing part.
In other words, taking an active role in seeking out a variety of both primary and secondary sources, reading through them seriously, thinking critically about what they're claiming in the context of the broader world, and reaching a conclusion.
When your research process is, to some extent, steered by an algorithm, or even entirely hijacked by it, and you're just inexorably following the rabbit hole further and further down, that's not research, that's just content.
The last thing that really interests me about the Do Your Own Research crowd is that their process is such a clear reflection of some very specific American cultural narratives that come out of entertainment media.
It's these tropes of the lone wolf, the one good guy, the conspiracy theorist hero who, against all odds, against the efforts of censors and shadowy government agencies and the vast ignorance or indifference of the masses, manages to reveal the capital T truth and win the day.
But again, that's not research.
That's a story.
It's just more content.
Circling back to some of the narrative you outlined in your first question of the modern library being in transformation and going through this process of reevaluation with regard to its history as a mechanism of social norms, that really runs against this just-so story that I think a lot of liberals like to tell, which is that everything just catastrophically collapsed in 2016 with the election of Trump.
That libraries, along with legacy media companies and public agencies, used to all be just in the business of putting out clear and balanced information.
But, you know, you have referred me to some library science scholars like Rachel Kuo and Alec Marwick, who really debunk that notion that misinformation just swooped in out of the blue and They look at why it stuck, so they write the following, quote, In public discourse, disinformation is tied inextricably to social media and technology platforms, and often curiously depoliticized, framed as polluting or infecting an otherwise healthy information ecosystem.
This framing disconnects disinformation from the broader politics of knowledge production and systems of power that undergird it.
In other words, who benefits?
And why?
So, I think this really troubles the notion of the library as a shining bastion of unbiased, enlightening information.
The scholars argue that viewing the current wave as kind of an infection is not going to explain Why conspiracy theories implicating race, Jews, and sexual deviance took root.
So just to take one small example, I remember in the libraries of my childhood like the New York Times being put out on these beautiful oak spindles every day and it was very sort of classy and then you could take it down from the rack and put it out on an equally shiny or burnished oak table.
And just open up the pages like some sort of medieval manuscript.
And that was the feeling of the paper of record.
But when the New York Times like uncritically echoed Clinton's language around super predators, it contributes, there are many other examples, but it contributes to a legitimized racist narrative out there for people to build on.
And if librarians have been dutifully putting that paper out on those wooden spools, that's part of the problem.
Am I right?
It's such an important thing to recognize when we're talking about any industry that produces or disseminates information.
It's relevant not just to libraries, but also to journalists, influencers, authors, academics, and even entertainment media.
Kuo and Marwick specifically take issue with the notion that the information ecosystem was ever healthy to begin with, because, realistically, American and, to a larger degree, Western information ecosystems have always been subject to what's known as epistemic supremacy.
I first came across the term epistemic supremacy in an article written by scholars Myrna E. Morales and Stacey Williams.
Who define it as, quote, societal systems, infrastructures and knowledge pathways that facilitate and uphold the conditions for tyranny and fascism by destroying any system of knowledge not controlled by the ruling class as a means of facilitating racial monopoly capitalism, unquote.
And so, in other words, it's this idea that the dominant or the ruling class gets to set the terms of history.
In America, we see this reflected everywhere in our education system.
The founding myth of America posits that the Pilgrims and the Native Americans were happy friends and that the Native Americans graciously ceded their lands to white settlers because manifest destiny or whatever.
It doesn't even bother to name the specific tribal confederation who formed an alliance with the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag, Or mention that when the Pilgrims arrived, there was an existing, complex socio-political situation between the Wampanoag and another local tribe, the Narragansett, that drove the Wampanoag to ally themselves with the Pilgrims as a diplomatic maneuver to strengthen their position in the region.
It doesn't acknowledge the existing Indigenous civilizations or cultures.
It doesn't outline the ways that white settlers seized land by reneging on treaties or by tricking, forcibly displacing, or outright killing Indigenous people.
It says nothing about the cultural genocide conducted at residential boarding schools run by white people.
It never admits that, while amassing power in Germany prior to World War II, the Nazis studied American federal policy toward Indigenous people to inform the template of the Holocaust.
Mainstream American history glosses over the institution of slavery with euphemistic language in the South and not-us erasures in the North, and we barely acknowledge that slavery was the direct cause of the Civil War.
There's little common understanding of the Jim Crow era, and what few Black people are recognized by history are those deemed unobjectionable or shrunk down to suit white standards.
For example, Martin Luther King Jr., whose callouts of white moderates and demands for reparations have gone totally unmentioned in textbooks.
We don't talk about America's obsession with eugenics or the medical experimentations that white doctors conducted on black people, often without their knowledge or consent.
At this point, you might have heard of the Tuskegee syphilis study, but have you heard of so-called Mississippi appendectomies?
That's something to look into.
And then, you know, we also see this epistemic supremacy in the continuous erasure of LGBTQ plus people in Western history.
The pearl-clutching protestations that trans people are a totally new phenomenon when, in fact, an explicit part of the settler colonial project was the violent suppression of Indigenous two-spirit or otherwise gender non-conforming people.
Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, was confounding the courts with their ambiguous body and gender expression in the 1620s.
Dr. James Berry was born in the late 1700s, and Mary Jones lived in the 1800s.
And if you've never heard those names before, ask yourself why!
This deliberate erasure is why someone like J.K.
Rowling can tweet with a straight face that the Nazis never targeted trans people, when in fact, trans people were among the first groups Nazis targeted, along with political enemies, communists, and disabled people, starting with the destruction of Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, whose research materials are pictured in one of the most famous photos of Nazi book burnings.
We also see it everywhere in our entertainment media and our fiction.
I talked about tropes earlier.
Well, epistemic supremacy is the reason that, for so long, trans women have been positioned as either absurdist jokes or objects of disgust, black people as either criminals or hapless victims that white people have to save, indigenous people as members of some sort of vanished, mythic, undifferentiated tribe, and on and on.
So, To wrap this up, when we assume that our information systems were just fine, actually, up until 2016, when Trump suddenly introduced alternative facts into the discourse, we're missing a much larger, much deeper point that, actually, our information systems have always been suspect.
And as long as our information and knowledge-making professions fail to acknowledge that, And if we keep uncritically lending our professional reputations to the narratives that epistemic supremacy has built, we're just going to keep perpetuating the system forward.
Okay, Heath, so then to recap and then transition and zoom in on the present, I think that you're saying that if we're going to fully understand how present reactionaries are agitating, we really can't bury this long history of institutional bias, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
If you're considering these groups like Moms for Liberty and other reactionaries, you can see that they're positioning themselves as sort of this defender of the real American history.
But their conception of real American history is this sort of elided, these forms of erasure
that we see coming through in these epistemic supremacist narratives.
So what this means is that the Moms for Liberty, for very different reasons,
and then similar groups alongside them, they're not wrong that libraries and knowledge systems
conserve governmental or oppression agendas.
Like, they're right about that.
And that's part of why they believe in their version of the do-your-own-research paradigm.
When you scratch the surface, they don't want that principle really applied in relation to their own children who they seek to guide and save from the wokesters.
They advocate for a parental rights approach to public information.
And then their actions wind up suppressing information access for everyone.
So, I wanted to With the historical background that you've provided, I wanted to run through a number of their talking points so that I can hear your responses.
So, today, what we will hear in the current contestation of the library space is that librarians are woke trans activists stalking books that indoctrinate children into critical race theory and gender ideology.
These are people who want them to hate who they are.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack with this one.
First off, and I hope that this is obvious, but just to be absolutely clear, librarians do not want anyone to hate who they are.
It's really counter to our policies around inclusivity and welcoming, if nothing else.
Beyond that, I would say that Because libraries seek to serve everyone in a community, we do stock a very wide array of books and resources.
Not every book is going to appeal to every reader, and that's okay.
We want each family or patron to find the books that are right for them.
No one is going to force you or your child to read anything that you don't want to, I promise.
Okay, but Heath, let's address the elephant in the room.
You are a trans, non-binary person.
How do I know you're not trying to indoctrinate my kids?
Oh, Matthew, no!
The trans agenda!
You're not supposed to talk about it!
I know, I know.
No, no, but you know, all joking aside, to be frank, Personally speaking, I don't want anything to do with your kids.
There's a reason that I'm a reference librarian, which means that I work with adult patrons.
But like, I do exist in the library.
You know, your kid might come in and catch a glimpse of me doing my work, and I might happen to look really fierce that day.
It's not on me how to change how I exist in the world, though.
It's on you, as a parent, to be prepared to contextualize me and people like me to your kids.
And you know what?
You can do that however you want.
That's between you and your kids.
Speaking more broadly, I'm not interested in indoctrinating anyone.
I'm interested in connecting people to a wide array of reputable, accurate sources so that they can reach their own fully informed conclusions, and the emphasis there is fully informed.
Okay, Heath, well I feel so much better.
Here's the next thing that we might hear from the Moms for Liberty, which is that libraries are exposing our kids to pornography.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a ridiculous allegation on its face.
Librarians choose materials based on professional review magazines, awards lists, bestseller lists, and recommendations from professional organizations.
These sources indicate a general age level for a given book, and every material contains age-appropriate content for that age level.
And then in the library itself, collections are physically separated out, usually into children's, teen, or YA, that's young adult, and adult.
So even if there is some steamy romance series, like Fifty Shades of Grey got a lot of press about being pornographic when it came out.
Fifty Shades of Grey is not going to be shelved anywhere near the children's room.
Nor are those books going to be readily available to children.
Realistically, this term pornography or pornographic is a dog whistle that's being applied to books that have LGBTQ plus content or to informational age-appropriate sex ed or anatomy books.
Would be censors.
No, it really doesn't play well to say like, oh, libraries are stocking LGBTQ plus books or Wow, did you know that libraries have books that teach children about anatomy?
Because yeah, okay, so what?
So instead, they use this really inflammatory language to mask their own discomfort or prejudices.
I think that it says a lot about American culture in general, that adults are effectively sexualizing age-appropriate books about anatomy, puberty, sex ed, or LGBTQ plus people.
It really doesn't have anything to do with the kids themselves.
So I want to clarify one thing by means of follow up, which is that in most library environments,
there are rules about unaccompanied minors.
In other words, if you are under a certain age, you have to have a parent there.
So in that sense, The parent is responsible for what the child picks up in the library in the same way that they're responsible for what the child interacts with in any other public space.
Have I got that right?
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
Librarians don't act in loco parentis.
So generally speaking, every library has a policy that children under a certain age, it's usually like 10 to 12 years old, although there's variation between libraries, Must be accompanied by an adult caretaker at all times.
Beyond that, preteens, which would be anyone between like 10 to 14-ish, often have to be accompanied by someone older, like an older sibling or a babysitter.
If we ever spot a little kid running loose in the library, we ask the child if their caregiver is present, we attempt to locate the caregiver, and then if we cannot find the caregiver, We call the police to report an unaccompanied minor.
Whether that's the best method to follow, getting police involved bears discussion, but that's what it is right now.
Additionally, I think it's really worth noting that kids can't register for a library card of their own without a parent's signed consent.
So even if a kid did wander into the library and somehow remain undetected, they still wouldn't be able to carry any books out with them.
There's this irony with the challenges posed by groups like Moms for Liberty to the public library system at this point because I think what you have is people entering libraries when maybe they're actually homeschooling their kids and searching themselves for materials that they find objectionable and then claiming that Their finding of those materials is equated to their children being exposed to them.
That's really a strange situation.
Yeah.
I mean, it goes back to what I was saying about, like, if you and your kids come in and you happen to see me working, even though I don't work with kids, it's on you as the parent to be prepared to explain in whatever terms you want.
I mean, I'm not going to sit there and tell someone not to tell their kids, like, oh, that's a confused person or, like, whatever they want to say.
It's the same thing with materials, where if you come in and you see that there's a pride display, I'm sorry, it is on you as the parent to decide how you want to guide your child.
Well, this is kind of related to this last common comment that I think we hear from this set, which is that Drag Queen Story Hour sexualizes our children and has no place in a publicly funded space.
Yeah, this is another claim that is just absurd on its face.
And to illustrate what I mean here, I want to think about a different scenario for a minute.
If an artist appeared at a children's library program to teach kid-friendly drawing techniques one day, And then, the next day, that artist hosted a workshop at an art school for adult students learning how to sketch nudes.
Would anyone say that that artist is a pornographer who should never be allowed access to children?
No.
Because clearly, the art that's being produced is tailored for the venue and the audience.
Drag is no different.
Drag as an art form is centered around playful performance.
It's colorful, it's joyous, it's inclusive.
All elements that are perfect for a children's story time.
And the reduction of the entire art of drag to some kind of 21 plus club performance is really frustrating.
Like the false notion that libraries are stalking pornography, Honey, it's not the library sexualizing anyone.
It's the people making these outlandish claims about drag performers and story times for children.
And you know what?
If you still don't like Drag Queen Story Hour, and you don't want your kids to go, okay!
Don't go!
Literally, no one is going to force you or your children to attend.
But, there are a lot of families who do want to attend these events, and guess what?
They pay taxes, too.
Now, Heath, some of the backlash to Drag Queen Story Hour comes from, I would say, normies on Twitter who see decontextualized video clips from libs of TikTok and who feel, oh, it seems like something is off there.
But are you aware of any drag queen story hour that has been, I don't know, disciplined by the administrations that have hired them or that have been complained about by people in attendance?
Short answer, no.
I am not aware of any sort of disciplinary action or objections to people who have actually attended these things.
There's a couple things that spring to mind.
So for anyone who is maybe a little concerned about how libraries are finding drag performers, I think it's very important to underline that, especially for youth services, any program that is geared towards children Presenters, performers, all have to undergo a voluntary Cori check.
So that's a background check to ensure that they have not committed any sort of crimes, nothing is really popping up as a red flag or anything.
And if someone cannot pass a Cori check, Then the library is not going to hire them to come work with children.
In the same sense that, like, teacher's aides or, like, if you as a parent volunteer at your kid's daycare, you might have to go through the same kind of police check as well.
Precisely, yes.
Okay.
And then the other thing that I would say is I think a lot of times when people are suspicious of these things, it's really worth drilling down into why you feel that way, instead of assuming that your instinct is right, without questioning it, really, really think, how was this clip presented to you?
Was it presented in a context that was trying to prompt you to be suspicious of it?
Do you have access to the entirety of the clip?
Or is it just like a five second selection that whoever is posting it decided to highlight?
Because it's easy when you're unfamiliar with something to say, ooh, that hits me the wrong way.
That seems wrong.
But when you go back and you really examine it, you know, I know of people who have gone to Drag Queen Story Hours because they had these concerns.
And by and large, the reaction coming out of it is, wow, that was really boring.
Because it's a children's program that is geared towards children.
You know, you're going, you're going to be experiencing some silly little songs.
You're going to be doing some dances.
There's going to be glitter.
There's going to be a storybook that gets read.
It's not geared towards adults.
And I think that anybody with young kids in their lives understands that children's programming is boring for adults.
Okay, so there are a couple of things that I'm pretty sure your training did not prepare you for.
I've got three of them in this list.
So, the first is bad faith book challenges.
So, can you walk us through how that works?
Yeah.
So, I would say there's two different kinds of bad faith challenges that we're seeing these days.
First, looking at data from 2021 to 2022, literally 11 people were responsible for 60% of all book challenges in school libraries throughout the country.
Okay, so let's just underline that.
We're talking about 11 people who are probably working remotely complaining about books in libraries and districts that they don't live in.
Absolutely, yeah.
They don't live in the communities that they're targeting.
Sometimes they don't even live in the same state as the schools that they're targeting.
They don't necessarily have any connections to the schools, like they don't have any students who are enrolled there, and frequently they haven't even read the books that they want removed.
Instead, they're finding these lists of so-called objectionable books that people have posted on the internet, they're using copy and paste templates to create their challenges, and then they're just submitting them in bulk wherever they can.
And it's to the extent that There are people who have submitted challenges to books that are not even stocked in a given library.
So they're saying, hey, pull this book off of the shelf.
And the school librarian is sitting there like, we don't even own that book.
What are you talking about?
And is that because they're not sort of taking the time to figure out who's stocking which books because it's a copy and paste operation?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's just kind of trying to overwhelm the system as much as possible.
And it's also working on this assumption that every single book has the same exact collection, which is not true.
Are librarians legally obliged or obliged by best practices to field those requests or can they ignore them?
I would say that prior to today, there has been A real effort among librarians to take challenges in good faith.
And we do have a number of policies that guide what happens when a four-wheel challenge is submitted.
I think that the landscape around these kind of bad faith challenges is going to see a lot of changes in how the policies are enacted.
So, for example, we have now seen a few states consider and even pass legislation that effectively ban book bans.
So that makes it so that librarians don't have to waste time and resources answering these sort of bogus claims.
But there are some libraries that aren't in supportive states that are still very much being held hostage by this huge amount of incoming stuff from the internet.
Well, speaking of being held hostage, I'm pretty sure that in your library science studies, you were not prepared to deal with bomb threats.
What are the impacts of that escalation today?
It is a terrifying fact that working in libraries right now, that you might just get a bomb threat, or two, or three, just for having the quote-unquote wrong book on your shelf, or inviting the wrong speaker, or having a supportive flag or slogan visible anywhere.
For librarians who are part of targeted marginalized communities and can't hide that fact, So we're talking about people, librarians who are black or who are visibly trans, for example.
It really increases your sense of vulnerability.
You're much more likely to be singled out for blame and harassment, even if you weren't involved in whatever drew the complaints to begin with.
And that leads to burnout and a loss of professional diversity as these librarians leave the field to protect their mental and physical health.
At the same time, for our librarians who can hide their marginalized status, you start weighing whether to repress your identity in order to increase your safety.
And the same goes for allies.
And especially for librarians who maybe weren't all that bought into DEI practices to begin with, there is a sense of, like, why should I stick my neck out when, for me, the reward is so small and the potential punishment is so huge?
It's very insidious.
It becomes easy to just not buy that LGBTQ plus book or not put up that Juneteenth display or not invite that speaker to come talk about immigration because you know that if you do, it might cause someone to call in a bomb threat.
Not only does that make it clear that the library is not actually a safe, inclusive space, It also contributes to the further erasure and disenfranchisement of the targeted communities.
Libraries, as well as the publishing industry, are very data-driven.
If publishers interpret fewer sales as less demand for books by people of color, for example, they'll reduce the number of contracts that they offer to authors of color.
which in turn decreases the number of books by authors of color,
which seemingly decreases demand as these books become harder to find.
It's just this really vicious cycle.
Last thing that you probably didn't have any seminars on, librarians have always been maintaining
a kind of third space apart from working environments and home environments.
But at this point, you're also taking on the responsibility of refuge as poverty and houselessness are on the rise.
Now, there are huge challenges to these new responsibilities.
But for you, is there a continuity between access to knowledge and access to safety?
Yeah, I think there absolutely is.
On one hand, I think it's clear that you can't learn if you don't feel safe.
It requires time, energy, and the freedom to seek out resources and inform yourself, unimpeded by obstacles, whether that's an external force that's prescribing your access to information, or an internal reluctance that's rooted in fear, shame, or guilt, or lack, or some combination of both of those things.
On the other hand, you can't really achieve safety unless you're given the space and ability to make informed decisions about what qualifies for you as safety.
This is why people in need are turning to libraries to help them create resumes and apply for jobs, get vetted health information, or find resources when they're in crisis.
Or just sit in a quiet place where they aren't subject to the pressures, prejudices, or even violence that might exist in the other spaces of their lives.
Here's my last question, Heath.
I want libraries everywhere to stay open.
I want new libraries to open.
I want the bomb threats to end.
I don't want bogus book challenges emptying out shelves.
I don't want implied or threatened violence to weigh upon especially marginalized library workers to the extent that they have to leave.
I want kids who don't have resources at home or can't find them in the best way on the internet to find a place.
Yeah, I really appreciate this question.
And fortunately, there are actually a lot of ways that you can support your library, depending on your bandwidth and your resources.
The most basic thing that you can do is simply to use your local library.
Sign up for a library card, attend programs, check out books, and find out what services they offer.
You might even be surprised at what they have that you didn't know that you needed.
And if you like the things that you see your library doing, tell them!
A brief email to the library's director expressing your clear appreciation for a book, a display, or a service can go a really long way.
Now, if you have the ability, you can also consider making a monetary donation.
And I emphasize monetary here because a lot of people are like, oh, donation, books.
And yes, we do like books, but realistically, money is more versatile.
And it tends to be in greater demand.
Libraries are generally funded by the state that they're in or their municipality.
And there are funds that are specifically earmarked for collections.
So we kind of have that covered.
We can buy the books.
But getting just money that's un-earmarked to use toward different services or funding programs, that's really, really invaluable.
If you don't have money, but you do have some time, you can volunteer with the Friends of the Library, or on the Board of Trustees, if your library has one.
So, Friends of the Library help with fundraising, and Trustees help to oversee library operations.
And as you can imagine, it's really, really good to have volunteers whose values are aligned with the values of the library.
Finally, Just stay involved in your local government.
Keep an eye on who is running for school boards, for library boards, and for government positions.
Make sure that the people who are running for those positions are not expressing prejudices, or using dog whistles, or repeating conspiracy theories, or threatening to defund the services that they disagree with.
Participate in local voting and urge your loved ones to vote too.
Contact your state representatives in favor of library-friendly legislation or against unfriendly legislation.
What I want to kind of finish off with here is I want everybody to remember your library belongs as much to you as to anyone else in your community.
You have the right to see your values and your perspectives represented.
You deserve to have a library that serves you.
Heath Umbright, thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you.
Hey everyone, Matthew here again.
After I recorded with Heath, they sent an email with a clarification, and that's really good practice, so I'm just gonna read that email to close out.
During the interview, Matthew posed a question about whether any drag performers involved in library story times have been responsible for crimes against minors, including crimes of sexual abuse.
I responded, no, not that I was aware of, which was truthfully reflective of my knowledge at that moment.
After the interview wrapped, however, I felt an obligation to fact-check my answer for accuracy.
My resulting reference search uncovered no evidence of any inappropriate behavior of drag performers toward minors in conjunction with Drag Queen Story Hour programs.
I feel I do need to flag one related story, however.
In 2019, news broke that one of the drag performers who participated in one to three storytime events at the Houston Public Library in 2017-2018 had a 2008 conviction for sexual assault against a minor.
Reports vary as to whether the performer participated in a single 2018 event or if she participated in up to three events spanning 2017 and 2018.
The Houston Public Library released an official statement noting, quote, In our review of our process and of this participant, we discovered that we failed to complete a background check as required by our own guidelines.
Every program sponsored by HPL is supervised by HPL staff And all children are accompanied by a parent and or guardian.
No participant is ever alone with children, and we have not received any complaints about any inappropriate behavior by participants at story times."
According to Houston Police, the performer was fully in compliance with her registration.
The police further stated that, quote, since she's already served her probation, there are no restrictions as to where she can go, live, or with whom she can affiliate.
That means she can legally be around children, unquote.
The library affirmed it would not work with the performer again, and that it would ensure full compliance with their own background check requirements moving forward.
Thus, to offer a fully informed answer to Matthew's question, although a performer with a prior sexual assault conviction participated in 1-3 drag queen story times at a single library 6-7 years ago, There is no evidence of any inappropriate behavior of drag performers toward minors in conjunction with any Drag Queen Story Hour programs at any U.S.
library to date.
Now, for those interested in a comprehensive comparative analysis about the risk that drag queens versus other adults could pose to children, I strongly recommend reviewing the data on Kristen Browde's website, Who's Making News.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.