147 transcript

Jay:
[0:00] Who's this little lobster guy that's on your microphone?

Josh:
[0:03] This is my little friend.

Jay:
[0:04] Okay.

Josh:
[0:05] He hangs out on the streams that I do because I stream a couple times a week.

Jay:
[0:10] Okay.

Josh:
[0:10] His name is White Santa. The reason that he's named White Santa is that I made the mistake of asking chat to name him when we were in the middle of a discussion about Megyn Kelly. And they said, name him White Santa. And the name stuck very quickly.

Jay:
[0:25] All right.

Josh:
[0:25] But it's also, I mean, he's just a cute little guy. He's just a little guy. I love him. You can't be talking like that, White Santa. You can't be talking like that.

Jay:
[0:32] White Santa. That's exactly right.

Josh:
[0:34] And that's me at most times. You'd be surprised at how racist this kid is. It's really bad. Yeah, it's traditional scrunch now, but I think I was early. I think I might still have the first little tier thingy that they give you. Oh, like from Trash Future way back in the day? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's funny now because there's actually nobody even on the stream anymore who is part of Trash Future. because now November's not really on it anymore. Mm-hmm. Me and Jay are big fans of Worst of All Possible Worlds. Oh, hell yeah.

Jay:
[1:07] He quizzes me on factoids.

Josh:
[1:10] From the show. Okay. You did the, what was it, the Sweetie Todd episode? Oh, yeah. That was a good one.

Jay:
[1:17] Because Tinder Subject, we did one as well.

Josh:
[1:19] Oh, cool.

Jay:
[1:20] Yeah. So I was like, do you remember on the Worst of All Possible Worlds when they were.

Josh:
[1:23] Mentioning during that presentation? I'm like, no. Let's make sure that my soundboard's working. Mmm! So good and tasty! There we go.

Jay:
[1:33] One day I will kill him over the soundboard, but maybe not today. It is good. See, you've encouraged me.

Josh:
[1:40] Someone who appreciates my soundboard, and I'm going to be using a little crazy. I mean, I would be a hypocrite if I were to discourage people from using a soundboard, given how our show operates. Like, every so often, I'll just be chilling, and Brian will hit me with a hee-whot, and then that's just, you know.

Jay:
[1:56] I need to get that one.

Josh:
[1:58] Behold, the atheist's nightmare.

Jay:
[2:00] Yeah, all three of us grew up. Some flavor of like evangelical or other weirdo Christian.

Josh:
[2:07] So where are y'all from?

Jay:
[2:08] I'm from Southern Illinois. So right in the Bible belt originally. Yep. Yep. I'm from Florida.

Josh:
[2:14] So I grew up Southern Baptist. The, uh, okay. The fun ones to split off for the good reasons.

Sadie:
[2:20] I'm in Western Washington, Seattle area. And I was raised Mormon.

Josh:
[2:24] Oh, hell yeah.

Jay:
[2:26] Okay, cool.

Josh:
[2:27] My entire exposure to Mormonism is basically through my friends who live in Utah.

Jay:
[2:32] I used to live in Salt Lake City, yeah.

Josh:
[2:34] Okay, yeah. As well as, of course, the classic movie musical, Saturday's Warrior.

Sadie:
[2:40] Oh my god.

Josh:
[2:41] Have you seen Saturday's Warrior?

Sadie:
[2:42] My dad used to watch it every Saturday.

Josh:
[2:45] Yes! This is great. We're learning new Sadie lore. These are they on Saturday. That is such a bad musical and so many of the songs are so good. Like, better than they have any right to be. Alright, we'll get started. Cool. Thank you.

Jay:
[3:16] Oops. Fade out too soon. I switched the soundboards so I had more of my stuff. And I didn't realize I was going to shut the sound off. Leave it.

Sadie:
[3:34] Technical difficulties.

Jay:
[3:35] All right. I'm Justin. I'm a free agent. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie.

Sadie:
[3:41] I work IT at a public library. And my pronouns are they, them.

Jay:
[3:44] I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest.

Josh:
[3:50] Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes. Hello. My name's Josh. I am the son and grandson of librarians, though I am not a librarian myself. I use he, him pronouns. Nailed it. Yes.

Jay:
[4:04] You did it. You get a gold star.

Josh:
[4:07] Thank you for your support. That's right, boys.

Jay:
[4:10] Mondo cool. Oh, no. He's going to be on what this is. i'm really excited.

Josh:
[4:16] I'm getting the feeling i've made a terrible terrible mistake.

Jay:
[4:19] Yes no no this is good people love this nice i'm the podcast favorite, sure okay well we are going to talk about the patmos public library but, and move to another state uh so yeah that's that's what's happening there uh shit's bad if.

Sadie:
[5:19] You live in iowa write to your representatives immediately by.

Jay:
[5:23] Gun you can do that.

Josh:
[5:26] In iowa haven't.

Jay:
[5:27] Said it in 10 episodes or so so we're back to form i don't have a job i can't get yelled at for getting my Twitter deleted at work. True story. Somehow. It's true. I don't talk about anything I do on social media at work, but I must have mentioned it once, And it's like the library director quit. And I was like, you're going to have to be more specific.

Josh:
[6:03] A lot more specific than that. Yeah.

Jay:
[6:05] You got to really narrow it down there, buddy.

Josh:
[6:07] No, this was kind of the OG, like, banned library controversy because of the way that they had the millage, they failed to pass the millage renewal, that ended up shutting down the library, and this was one of the first ones that made the news in a national way, especially because it's a connection to the book Genderqueer and all that sort of thing.

Jay:
[6:27] Yeah, I have had a Google alert running for a while now. And so I just, Massachusetts who looks at my Texas ID and goes, oh, Texas. That was the news.

Josh:
[7:05] Is that the typical voice that people normally make when you talk about Texas? They go, Texas. Yeah.

Jay:
[7:09] Or every time I'm like, my boyfriend lives in Texas, they're like, oh, and I'm like, yeah. They really do. They have like such a visceral reaction. Like I go to the weed store and I show my ID to get into the weed store and they're like, oh, the scanner's not working. It must be because it's a Texas ID. Or we remember we were at the we were at the Sam Adams Brewery and it said, who's traveled the furthest to be here tonight? And I won. Yeah. Because he's like, unfortunately, it has to go to the guy.

Josh:
[7:38] I'm not Greg Abbott. Get off my dick. So I don't know what Texas did to you, but it is worse to the people who live there. Is it? Do you recommend? Not if you're trans, no. Okay. What about just like in general, like if you're not trans or? I live in a very interesting part of Texas, so I live right on the border. And so it's very culturally distinct from the rest of Texas. Texas is basically like three or four states. So I would say like.

Josh:
[8:36] Until recently. And then the moment they started paying attention, they started winning. So... Well, that's definitely a commonality between I think Texas and the great state of Michigan, which Michigan is... Really three states in one, maybe four if you can, like the thumb is also sort of its own thing. But yeah, you've got West Michigan, Eastern Michigan, and then everything from like the tip of the mitten up through the UP. For all intents and purposes, those are basically three different states that all happen to share a government. Yeah. Many such cases. I mean, I grew up in Florida, so I'm used to like big crazy states. So it's, you know, Miami's its own thing. Tampa's, like my heart's beating at 10 seconds after conception and Jesus loves you. And you start seeing those. He loves you a lot. I love the ones that are just like, remember Jesus? I'm like, I too remember Jesus.

Jay:
[9:34] Whatever happened to that guy? Where'd he go?

Sadie:
[9:38] Long time no see. He hasn't dropped an album in a while.

Josh:
[9:42] Main stage at the Grammy Awards. Folks, he's back. You might remember him. He's our Lord and Savior, best known for dying on the cross roughly 1,980 years ago. Folks, give it up. Give it up for Jesus Christ back here on the track. Rome thought they had him beat. I'm turning my chair around. I'm turning my.

Jay:
[10:06] Hat and my chair around. I'm straddling the chair and I'm saying, guys, you know who else.

Josh:
[10:10] Gets knocked down and he gets up again? You're never going to keep him down. Jumbawamba, yeah. You know, I guess I should just sort of clear a few things up top here, too. You know, I'm excited to be on here to talk about library shit, because even though, as I said, I am not a librarian myself, it has always been something that's been a part of my upbringing. You know, my mom is a children's librarian. I grew up reading books. I grew up going to the library.

Josh:
[10:37] Some of my best friends, because I was a weird little, you know, shrimpy kid, some of my best friends were the librarians at my local public library. So this sort of thing really matters to me. And so with the story of the Jamestown Library specifically, it's one of those things that runs up against both my sort of cultural, I guess, milieu, what I grew up with, as well as the political landscape that I care about a great deal that I also talk about a fair bit on my own podcast. And so I'm excited to kind of get into it and talk a little bit about this sort of individual case study in a library in a small conservative community and why I think it matters, not just as an individual example, but also as one emblematic form of a battle that is happening all over the country. Yeah. And why don't you go ahead and tell us your back, you know, a little bit of background about Ottawa County? Sure. Well, so this library that we're going to be talking about today is called the Patmos Public Library. Just want to clear that up. That's the pronunciation. I've heard a lot of different pronunciations. They are all incorrect. The correct pronunciation for this thing is Patmos. And it is located in a county called Ottawa, the county of Ottawa in the state of Michigan. And basically, that county was settled by these ultra conservative Dutch Protestants beginning in the mid 1800s. And so the whole reason it's called Ottawa County is that those, of course, are the people who were displaced.

Josh:
[12:04] There are still some Ottawa people who live in and around the area. But yeah, that was the land that got expropriated. Those were the people who it was expropriated from.

Josh:
[12:13] And Ottawa County is, I would say, really the beating heart of Republican politics today. In West Michigan. When it comes to your standard issue, Republican freak, right? They probably, if they're in Michigan, they're probably either from that area or they are connected to people who are. That is where the power center is. It's the DeVos political machine, Betsy DeVos. She came up out of there. She cut her teeth there. She's probably the best known example of the type of guy who emerges from Ottawa County.

Jay:
[12:47] So we can like solidly blame the Dutch for this is what you're saying.

Josh:
[12:50] Hundo P, yes. I mean, it is pretty much the entire communities that settled there originally were all these ultra hardcore Dutch Protestants who wanted to set up their own basically ethnic enclave in Michigan and successfully did so. And so the politics of the area are all drawn along those lines. Ottawa County went 59% Trump in the most recent election, but Jamestown specifically, which is the township that we're going to be talking about today, it is basically a subdivision of that county. They're called townships in Michigan if they're unincorporated land and not like an actual city proper. Jamestown is in the southeast corner of Ottawa County, and the township went 75% Trump in the last election. And if you look back at the past few elections, that's pretty much been the margin, is around a 50% margin. So it should give you a good sense of kind of what this place is. Up yours, woke moralists. We'll see who cancels who. You're goddamn right, Jordan. They did say that. Available for kissing practice.

Jay:
[13:54] On a portable Nintendo. though. Justin, how many fucking... Kermit fuckhead sound drops you have do not play them all that i asked for a count, i i think that's just us too okay i have to start.

Sadie:
[14:13] Supervising the soundboard.

Jay:
[14:16] It's like i'm cutting you off if we had a dedicated soundboard person i'd be okay with that just someone just to come in and hit the ham horn every once in a while just justin stop we keep on track, I've barely been using the soundboard. I don't know why you're complaining now. So you have a little thing here about cultural conservatism.

Josh:
[14:40] In Michigan and how it's a little different from other parts of the county. Yeah. I mean, it's worth noting that there are some commonalities about cultural conservatism, no matter where you are. The fear of the outside world is kind of the big thing. And that's the whole reason that these people settled down in michigan in the first place was they wanted a place where they could be cloistered from the pernicious influence of the other people in the netherlands who were becoming i guess too liberal or whatever um but but but there's also a really strong tradition of i wouldn't call it intellectual curiosity exactly but it's this idea that like we need to have records of everything those records need to be well maintained and people need to be able to have access to those records. Which, again, I just chalk up to kind of being Dutch. Like, that's a big piece of what it is to be Dutch. But that's the one thing about all of this that makes it a little bit different. And that's why, you know, it's like, well, why...

Josh:
[15:36] Why is there this really strong tradition of like really good public libraries in these very conservative parts of the state? And in West Michigan in particular, the answer is, well, because they're Dutch, genuinely. And this is also where I should note that I grew up in Kent County, which is the next county over from Ottawa. And I actually spent much of my childhood in Ottawa County, specifically along the lake there, Lake Michigan. And this is the part where I reveal that the Patmos Library, the reason I can pronounce Patmos so well, is that it is the name of my great uncle, Marv, who endowed the township with $1 million to build a new library back in the year 2000. So, I know. So when I heard that, you know, this was happening not just near my hometown, because I grew up in Grand Rapids, but also was specifically affecting.

Josh:
[16:29] It would be an exaggeration would say like my family's legacy. But it is something that is directly personally connected to me because a little bit about Marv, basically his whole deal was he never got past the eighth grade, but he was able to learn a lot by reading. And so he was like, well, other people should be able to do that too. And that's why he endowed the library. Yeah. Many such cases. I wonder also if, because I did see in the various news, like local news.

Josh:
[17:43] History of the university that they put out, but they had to take that out. But the historians who wrote it left it in a footnote because historians are really funny like that. In the case of the Jamestown Township Library specifically, it was just built as a standard issue public library in 1965. So it's been a public library for its entire existence. The donation was basically just so they could build a bigger building. Yeah. To the point of like, I guess, the cultural homogeneity or lack thereof, it is fair to say that that part of Michigan is almost exclusively white and specifically ethnically Dutch. When you get into the bigger cities, specifically Grand Rapids, there's a fair more diversity. But I would say that historically, these are communities that were extremely homogeneous. Yeah. And I think a lot of people take that for granted when they look at the history of their area and go, well, it didn't.

Jay:
[18:37] Really happen here. It's like, yeah, there's reasons. So the initial complaints about this, about Patmos was over genderqueer. This, was removed from the shelves and put behind the counter and since they had went ahead and capitulated opponents formed a group the jamestown conservatives who suggested the library was grooming.

Josh:
[19:04] Was real big it was it was the new gritty and everyone was hitting it and they were saying yeah and so they said let's let's vote against the millage and.

Jay:
[19:39] These come up in the book ban news as often so i figured i'd go ahead and mention those this also reminds me like this is like so retro almost like this reminds me of in john waters or john waters this sort of like stand-up lecture this filthy world that he gives he talks about when he was younger all the dirty books he wanted to read were always behind the counter and they said sea librarian in order to read them and he would go steal those books and like gone are the halcyon days where you could find the naughty books in the sea librarian section like this just feels so retro it's so stupid.

Josh:
[20:15] I think it's also worth noting in terms of like the millage itself that because Jamestown is a township and not a city, taxes are very low there. And the millage itself is not a meaningful tax. You know, we're talking about like two hundred thousand dollars ish split across maybe ten thousand people. But it's it's not not anything. And this is a hardcore anti-tax kind of area. So I think that does play into it as well. Yeah. And I mean, speaking of old school, when I was going through a lot of local stories, I saw like, to, what is the site? Bridge, Michigan, bridgemi.com. Bridge is a really, really good publication for like local progressive news. Yeah. It's a lot of their articles go into way more depth than you expect they're.

Jay:
[21:31] There were too many books written by Jewish people was one of the complaints. I mean, we're hitting classics. And so it was a really nice roundup of like some of the complaints that people were coming in. And the, I need to show up and vote no and put a giant sign in my yard that says.

Josh:
[22:09] Hang on, let me get the exact word. I've got it right here.

Jay:
[22:12] It's a great sign.

Josh:
[22:13] 50% millage increase. And that's all caps in red to groom. Groom that's also all caps and it's much larger font our kids vote lowercase vote no on library, exactly vote no on library is very funny to me it has the feeling of look at banner michael from arrested development you.

Jay:
[22:38] Know you've got a winning campaign when you're like vote no on da library.

Josh:
[22:43] On library.

Jay:
[22:44] On library. There's no like, and this is like, okay, so to everyone who makes goofy little protest signs so that you'll get on like Instagram or whatever when you go to a march, stop that shit. Make concrete demands and they're not even doing it right because they don't have the like number of the proposition or whatever. You got to give people specifics. Vote no on number eight. Boom. Solid. Too many words.

Josh:
[23:10] Anytime you see anything about a library anywhere, you need to vote against it. That's the rule.

Jay:
[23:17] Yeah. So, yeah, we've talked about millage votes before in the past and some of the contentious fights that tend to accompany, threaten to torpedo it and... Yeah, so you get a lot of that. Now, Josh, do you have any ideas if book bans or challenges, like I'm assuming they happened at this library before, but do you know, like, was it different kinds of books or coming from different people before then? Like, usually challenges happen at schools, but I don't know if you knew.

Josh:
[23:52] I don't know specifically in this case. I do know that there are this this came off the back of a lot of other action going on nationally, particularly like right after the acute period of the pandemic. There was that period of time where the schools were still not open and it was like, open the schools that that agitation ended up being a very effective form of organizing for the reactionary. Right. Obviously, moms for liberty groups like that. And this particular situation, I don't know if it was spearheaded by moms for liberty, but it was groups like that that were providing a lot of the ammunition in terms of going out there. And making the message. They were definitely getting assistance from that sort of grassroots, quote unquote, but really astroturfing type organizations. Yeah, highly astroturfed. If you look at the rhetoric that was being used, it all aligns with the Moms for Liberty playbook. But like I said, I don't know. I can take a look and see if there's actually an explicit connection there. But if you look at the videos of the people at the town halls and shit, it's all the same talking points. Yeah, we did an episode on Moms for Liberty, and I really dived into their connections. And essentially.

Josh:
[25:16] Up his campaign filings and couldn't spend his money? So that's where a lot of this money went, was to funding other groups like Moms for Liberty, and they have a project called Moms for Libraries. This also.

Jay:
[25:29] Brave Books, which I believe is, What's the left behind guy? Oh, what is his fucking name?

Josh:
[25:36] The guy who wrote it?

Jay:
[25:37] Or Kirk Cameron? Kirk Cameron.

Josh:
[25:41] Friend of our show. Friend of the worst of all possible worlds.

Jay:
[25:44] Kirk Cameron. I love the left behind movies. They're so bad. He was involved in that and then there was some other stuff that all kind of came together into this kind of ball of anti-library stuff. Were you showing us Arthur? Yeah, look how cute he's been. being on my body pillow. He's sitting like a little guy.

Josh:
[26:07] There's a cat over on the pillow. This is an audio-only medium, but we're looking at a very cute cat.

Jay:
[26:12] Yeah, as library punk heads know King Arthur and how cute he is. Yeah, so that's a lot of where Moms for Liberty comes from. I did a real deep dive. For like talking points and placards. That's their membership because it's free to be a member. So and they also say they make all their money from T-shirt sales.

Josh:
[26:52] Which is impossible. It's not too much money. Worth noting also that we on our show talked about a few years ago now a show called or documentary rather documentary and heavy air quotes called Whose Children Are They? And this was one of many examples of propaganda that is intended to make people agitated against teachers, but in a way where they think they actually like love their teachers. So much of this actually ends up being anti-union propaganda, though, at the end of the day, which is really interesting. The culture war side of things is tied right in with a strong, strong distaste for the power of the public sector. And a fair bit of this culture war is just really craven politicking, where reactionary conservative operatives are finding ways to put in a wedge around fears of things like gender and sexuality to drive a campaign to de-unionize schools. And expel, of course, librarians and stuff like that, which I'm sure you all know very much about. I'm just pointing it up for the sake of making the connection that this is as much an anti-labor thing as it is an anti-culture thing.

Jay:
[28:07] Because like most of the time when people say that they love their libraries and everything, oh, we love the library. The library is great. They don't give a shit about the people who work there. It is so often, especially this is true in academic libraries a lot, when some entitled faculty member learns that you're getting rid of their special journal that is their baby that they've been published in twice, but nobody else has ever. And you tell them like, well, we can't afford it in the budget because the state won't give us more. We can't get more money and these get more expensive. And they're like, well, then why do we need you? Yeah. What do you do? We have Google. like like so like in academic libraries some faculty would rather just have their journal subscriptions than have people working there this is why this is an anti little free library podcast by the way because those things obfuscate what libraries actually are and that libraries are about labor and not about fucking books thank you for coming to my ted talk plus it's a company and you have to register with it and they just call the cops on black people who use them yeah well Well.

Sadie:
[29:09] And that's why these political signs like vote no on library also just work, right? Is because it's library as an entity and not library workers, right? But on the flip side, one of the library systems I used to work at, when we went out for a levy for the first time in like a decade or more, they actually really pushed the library worker angle. Like these are the things that the people who work at your library, who live in your community are going to get like raises and all of this stuff. And it worked. So, yeah, it's like an interesting thing to see like, oh, yeah, vote no on library. What library? What vote? You know, the entity that is the public library. I love the entity. You know, that's the public library. And then it takes a lot of effort to get people to, yeah, see the actual workers who are running the library. And that it's prevalent in public libraries.

Jay:
[30:06] Too so now people think all librarians are either like us right where we're a bunch of like leftist troublemakers or they view them as like quirky progressives who wear lots of cardigans and all that like they're that usually people that's who a librarian is to people love a cardigan i do love a cardigan i've been cardigan pilled but like not all librarians are quote progressive right it's like how you get nurses who are very anti-science and everything, right? So like in this area, where at Patmos, did I say it right? Patmos? You did.

Josh:
[30:43] Patmos.

Jay:
[30:44] Oh yeah, Patmos.

Josh:
[30:45] The T is almost silent.

Jay:
[30:47] Patmos. Yeah, it's like, you know, like Benton is where I grew up.

Josh:
[30:51] Benton Harbor, yeah.

Jay:
[30:52] Yeah, yeah. That's where I grew up. So yeah, just swallow it. But yeah, are the librarians at Patmos... Where do they fall on this? Like the actual library workers who are receiving these challenges and have to deal with them. Like, are they like, yeah, we agree. These books are bad. Or are they like not?

Josh:
[31:10] So they're cut from what I can tell. They sort of fall into the space where they're not really they're not radical lefties, but they're also not like reactionary freaks. Right. These are just people who care about helping kids read at the end. Which is which is i think that's that's to me the common thing about like most librarians genuinely it's that it's just like yeah we want to help people get the resources that they want like that's the point of being a librarian and i know that it wore very very heavily on the people who were involved with this library to just have all of this ideological vitriol thrown at them because these are not like deeply ideological people beyond just having a commitment to literacy Yeah. So library director Amber McLean resigned, I think prior to the vote, in the.

Jay:
[32:02] She'd been harassed online and accused of indoctrinating children. And then interim director Matthew Lawrence resigned later. So their interim also left. I've also been accused of those things. I from I from what I was reading many people who were speaking up in favor of.

Josh:
[33:01] Leftist agenda is running the law in accordance with the way it's supposed to be run. Well, and something that I should note about Amber McClain as well is that she is a gay woman. Which, again, in the eyes of these people will make you a radical, radical ideologue just by virtue of your identity.

Jay:
[33:20] She's not the groomer because of the books. She's the groomer because she's gay.

Josh:
[33:24] Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. So the deck was kind of stacked against her from the beginning.

Jay:
[33:28] Yeah, no, I saw a couple of news articles about like trans, the very few trans library directors that there have been out there who have been resigning because of like either of their own volition or because the library board was like, you should probably resign like.

Josh:
[33:44] Well in this particular case the reason she resigned and this is just an article from the michigan advance uh apparently somebody came into the library in march of 2022 and said she was looking for the person she called quote that pedophile librarian and.

Jay:
[34:01] And that's when all your library workers pull an i am spartacus and they all start doing that is what you do in that situation yeah it also mentioned how like the at the time of the the millage, Bible and Ayn Rand on it. And it's like, you know, it's a conservative town library. Like, I don't know what they're really upset about. So the initial vote, voters rejected.

Josh:
[34:40] For a millage ballot effort for three months from then, from what I understand. I'm trying to make sure that I'm not getting it wrong. No, that's correct. So that was on the ballot at the same time as the general election in 2022. So, yeah, standard November ballot. That's the same ballot that all of the congressional shit was on. Okay. So, yeah, many people who said they voted to defund the library said they didn't believe it would close. They just wanted to send a message. I remember that. I remember that. That was the thing that drove me up the wall was like, what did you think would happen?

Jay:
[35:15] Just surprise Pikachu. you like yep.

Sadie:
[35:17] Real yeah leopards eating face party going on there brexit energy so yeah i mean obviously people got a little stir crazy and coven decided to to organize.

Jay:
[35:39] Michigan library association which pointed out you know There was basically about five challenged books in total out of 90 books. It's less than 0.01% of libraries collection. And.

Josh:
[35:53] Were giving donations to a GoFundMe from all across the world. So this made the news. Something that I also wanted to note about this is that it's pretty remarkable, actually, that they were able to get this campaign together because generally speaking, when it comes to these campaigns in favor of book bannings, it's a very small handful of people, a very, very small handful of people. I'm sure y'all have talked about this before the people who are lodging these complaints it's literally like 10 people.

Jay:
[36:23] And sometimes they aren't even from right their district like part of like the whole moms for libraries monster liberty like campaign is like these like literally boiler plate like templates of like here's the email you send here's what you do find every public library you can so some libraries now to sort of weaponize like whole like hole up against these have started of putting like rules around like who can submit book challenges if a book is challenged and we decide to keep it you can't submit another challenge to it you have to provide your library card number like all of this stuff because of this astroturfing that's happening and.

Josh:
[37:02] I mean i i saw a talk that maya kobabe gave actually the author of genderqueer talking about this stuff.

Jay:
[37:10] Uh and.

Josh:
[37:11] And And that was a little bit after the whole thing had had come and gone. But I think it was before they successfully refunded the library. Yeah, it was. It was right after the initial defunding, I think. Well, maybe not that exact talk, but I know that that was in the news soon after was authors were were standing up for this particular library. It was, you know, director quit, you know, I've, I've also seen footage of like library board meetings where, you know, the, the library director will give a speech right before they're about to have a vote on.

Jay:
[37:54] Apart because they happen way more often than you think. And the local news is kind of always a little surprised. It kind of always has a, oh, it's come to Grand Rapids. Oh, it's, someone I was following on Blue Sky and they just suddenly went like full Canadian nationalist. And I was like, that's not the right reaction to this. Just do an infinite jest and become a wheelchair Quebecois terrorist is all I got to say. We're in the infinite jest timeline now. It's just going to get crazy.

Josh:
[38:36] This is the year of the Depends adult undergarment. Yes.

Jay:
[38:39] Exactly. Thank you. someone understands my annoying infinite Jess jokes. Always encourage him. No, so like with them being surprised that like, oh, it worked like so much. So like all of us growing up in churches, we know that this has been the game plan for decades. Like in a very material political way, we are not surprised by this because we went to church and heard this shit when we were kids. Like nothing has changed. It's just becoming true now but i feel like most people who are voting on this who maybe aren't in those like evangelical hotbeds or whatever like so much of it is just aesthetic to them they don't think through the materialism of it or if they do it's not going to affect them so that when it does happen it starts affecting them they just like don't know how to process that because uh aaron sorkin should be put in the hag for the west wing because everyone thinks that that's how politics works right uh aaron.

Josh:
[39:41] Aaron sorkin aaron sorkin should be put in the hag for the news.

Jay:
[39:44] Uh actually aaron.

Josh:
[39:46] Sorkin should be put in the hag for the west wing and then executed for the newsroom but.

Jay:
[39:50] That's neither.

Josh:
[39:52] Here nor there i yeah exactly i think that when it comes to the evangelical approach to all of this the other thing that is worth noting is that the evangelical the standard ish kind of evangelical way of seeing the world cannot understand what it would be like to live life outside of the loving arms of the church.

Jay:
[40:14] Right.

Josh:
[40:15] Um, And so this is the thing that a lot of people have difficulty understanding, I find, is they'll be like, wait, but why can't they just be okay with other people living their lives the way that they want to live them and then keep their very doctrinaire prescriptive worldview sequestered to their own lives? And the answer is they don't think that that boundary exists. Genuinely, it is not something that conceptually makes sense to them.

Jay:
[40:44] Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the politicization of evangelicals was, again, a reaction to Act. I mean, evangelicals have always kind of been certain types of voting blocs, not always in bad ways, but particularly post-civil rights era. Again.

Josh:
[41:09] Like 90 million year old woman because this is Florida and a church. So, you know, this woman's like 10 years older than God. And she was like we need to take our country back and i was like okay where to go like we're still in we're still in pasco county florida like we're we are the pasco county once in a while gets in the news for like spying on kids.

Jay:
[41:39] Politicization is people don't really understand that this has all been well organized and this has always been the plan. Go get on your library board, go to the meetings, vote and shit, bank public opinions, harass people with their cars after. Get shit done. Yeah, we did have people on not that long ago with Right Dad talking about the particular library. But that was particularly more worker-focused. That was, you know, they were really trying to discipline their workforce. So the second vote went.

Josh:
[42:20] And total turnout was 5,400. So it was a higher turnout. Which makes sense, because it was a congressional election year in the general election in November. So, yeah. So the third vote, much lower turnout because it's not a congressional election year. So the vote is.

Jay:
[42:44] Put stickers on the cover pages of controversial books. This is shit we talked about in like cataloging 101 the labeling of books and is it good or not and usually the ethics questions that we would get are for a creationism book how do you classify that do you put that in the non-fiction section or in the fiction section like do you go by what it claims to be or what you believe it to be or for like memoirs that are then revealed to be a total piece of crap.

Jay:
[43:20] Fabricated. What do you do with those? Labeling books like this is incredibly antithetical to library and ethics as they currently stand because they're making a judgment call about.

Jay:
[43:36] Book like there's a difference between like a librarian and or a publisher being like here's the age appropriateness for this book because this is very common with like as i'm sure your mom knows like grade school level there's like age five to whatever this to whatever because it's often like reading levels right right and that's important to know especially if you're a parent you need to be able to go in the catalog and filter it for just that age group because your kid doesn't know this word yet right so like that that's fine that's not like a controversial type of labeling and like libraries have explicit materials like romance novels are a thing that are in libraries and they're just in a specific section like kind of a lot of libraries are going towards the more like genre model like bookstores are sometimes whether it's like oh here's the fiction but here's like the mystery and thriller and here's the romance or whatever within fiction that's also fine and not controversial this is controversial because you're making a judgment call about it but also where does this stop right this is one reason i have an issue with the harmful language statements that libraries do i know they're coming from a good place and some of them are done very well but who gets to decide what causes harm and to whom and who are they making that decision for.

Josh:
[44:58] I completely agree. And this is something that I mean, just for reference here, my world is the world of theater. That's that's what I do outside of my podcast. I make shows. I do theater. And I, It's it's a similar kind of situation where I'm like, if a playwright wants to say, hey, as a heads up, my play contains this, that and the other thing you should be aware. Obviously, that's fine. I'm not I, you know, I think it should be that way. I think that there are accessibility questions about like if I'm directing a production and it contains some flashing or like loud noises or whatever. I want people to be aware of that. That's something that it's not, it's not like an ideological thing. It's just a, hey, you should know. And if this is too much for you, then it's probably a good thing that you're not seeing it, you know? But then there's the other side of it, which is at what point do these content advisories or whatever just become a further way of cleaving acceptable information from unacceptable information?

Jay:
[46:02] Yes.

Josh:
[46:02] And that's something that scares me. And I think it happens a lot in theater too, actually. I think that there are a lot of shows now. There is a tendency as well in theater. We love how liberal theater is. Oh, God. This idea of, well, we need to protect people's sensibilities, but there are times at which that's probably not the approach that you want to take. There are times where it's good to be confrontational. There are times where I think it's important to surprise people and catch them off guard. And there's a way that you can do that where you're taking care of your audience, of course, taking care of your readers. And all of the books that have been targeted for banning, I think, do that very effectively. But... Yeah. At what point are you becoming the arbiter of what is and is not acceptable content?

Jay:
[46:50] I'm actually going to be going on Friend of the Pod, Here Be Media slash The Left Page next month to talk about the opera Don Giovanni and stagings of it like in a post-MeToo world because so much opera is trying to do the reparative thing. And some has done it very well, like Boston Lyric Opera just did a really good production of Madama Butterfly.

Josh:
[47:13] Oh, interesting.

Jay:
[47:13] Um, that like took a couple of years of doing like focus group testing with like local Japanese American, like advocacy groups.

Josh:
[47:21] Oh yeah.

Jay:
[47:22] Boston.

Josh:
[47:22] And you need serious dramaturgy to be able to pull something like that off too. You need a dedicated dramaturgy, you need dedicated creatives. Like that takes a lot of work.

Jay:
[47:30] And then they said it in internment camps.

Josh:
[47:32] Okay.

Jay:
[47:33] And said like that, that's how they changed the setting and everything. And they, but they like worked with the local community around this. And like, I feel like that is actually a very successful example of the like, let's do something challenging, but being reparative at the same time. Sometimes it's like, oh, let's this thing is harmful and bad. Let's girl boss this up because it's misogynistic usually. And it completely misses the point that the original was trying to make first off. But then it just is somehow worse.

Josh:
[48:01] Or it's just like Two Gentlemen of Verona, but woke. And it's like, but we don't need to do that play anymore. It just sucks. Sorry, Willie, you blew it with that one.

Jay:
[48:10] Not your best one, Will.

Josh:
[48:12] He was not bringing his best that time around. It was his first play. It has a lot of first play problems. And it's deeply, deeply misogynistic. But I'm off on a tangent about Shakespeare now. No, I love talking about Shakespeare.

Sadie:
[48:25] Especially when it comes to these content warnings. things like like i think justin said earlier like the bible was also on display right so it's like yeah it's.

Jay:
[48:35] The most challenged book usually.

Sadie:
[48:36] Yeah and it's like they don't even realize that their own bullshit can be targeted for this so it's like of course you know that whole liberal gotcha well the bible contains you know rape and whatever so let's put a content warning on that ha ha and I'm like.

Josh:
[48:51] Thank you, Aaron Sorkin.

Jay:
[48:54] That's some Aaron Sorkin-ass shit right there.

Sadie:
[48:56] It's like, I'm just like, it is not the gotcha that you think. It's actually just playing right into the way that they think about this kind of stuff. So that always irritates me when I see that argument when it comes to content warning. It's like, Show me a thousands-year-old book that doesn't have something incredibly cringy about humanity in it. Go ahead.

Jay:
[49:20] It's like to every—people listening, listen to me right now. To every single one of you who, when the executive order around trans people went out, and you went, oh, well, technically, it lists conception. We're all a fucking zygote. So we're all nothing. We're all women. You owe me $10.

Josh:
[49:39] Dollars just saying facts and logic didn't win your way through that one yeah no i no it's stupid but i guess this is the other side of it though that i that i did want to talk about briefly is that at the end of the day a public library does have to comport to the community standards of a given community and that's what makes this whole situation so difficult like yeah i i opened by talking about the political composition of Jamestown. Again, 75% Trump and some of the most annoying Christians you'll ever meet because you're going to have to find a way to work within the confines of that society, of that culture. And I don't like this solution, but at the same time, I do think that it's better than not having a public library. So I don't know how to square of the circle on that one, genuinely.

Josh:
[50:36] Yeah. And I mean, that's, I mean, one of the things which this particular library workers.

Josh:
[51:32] What it is it also invades on the privacy of the reader because anyone can see that big yellow sticker on the front of your book and so anyone who goes to check out that book can then be bullied can get.

Jay:
[51:59] This this solution is not a solution because all it did was segregate all the queer books in the library. Would rather have that than not have a library. Like, again, I agree with you, Josh, there like it's better to have a library because this we can work with. Right. Like this is something that can be temporary. Right. What if someone just ripped all the stickers off?

Sadie:
[52:20] I was just about to say that. Like, what if that just conveniently filled out and nobody noticed it?

Josh:
[52:26] I guess it depends on how the stickers are affixed. If they're affixed directly to the page, that can be difficult to do without tearing out a whole page. Another sticker on the sticker? Yeah, no.

Jay:
[52:36] Get your free Palestine stickers out, put them on there.

Josh:
[52:38] I want to be very clear. I'm not saying that this is a good solution.

Sadie:
[52:41] No.

Josh:
[52:42] I'm just thinking, what are the ways then that you can take this and organize around it? Because I think that some people are going to see this as an acceptable compromise. And then if if you can get them to that point maybe there then is a way to continue forward from there but i don't know what that looks like other than yeah being like you know these stickers are stupid which which they are you know.

Jay:
[53:06] I mean one thing that they could do and honestly every single library in this country should be doing this if they haven't already been doing it or if they're doing it to do it more whatever patron data you are holding on to in your integrated library system. Which is a lot of it because like, sometimes it's helpful to know who the last person who checked out a book was because it didn't get checked in properly. You can be like, hey, do you still have this? They go, no, I totally returned it. And then you go, okay, and you write it off. Like sometimes it's helpful to have that information. But in our current climate, you just need to be scrubbing everything all of the time. So that even if someone does check out one of these like sequestered out pornographic queer books or whatever the fuck like then it's also not on their record after they return it so that if whomsoever politicians come and ask for that or if there's some sort of warrant out for it then it cannot like if you don't have that data it can't be given away to hurt people so you should at least also be doing that i.

Josh:
[54:12] Think that's a really good point that when it comes to just sort of our reading habits in general that's one of many things that will be subject to increased surveillance.

Jay:
[54:20] And that's how they got kevin spacey in seven no lies but was it.

Josh:
[54:27] How they got kevin spacey in real life.

Jay:
[54:30] That's where i thought you were going with that because i forgot about seven, no i bring up seven all the time on this fucking podcast by the way i i did just want to.

Josh:
[54:38] Note as well to the point of like what kind of community jamestown is because i mentioned it a little bit earlier, but I went to the Census Bureau website, and it's shockingly white, even by standards of a place that's out in the middle of nowhere. 88.3% white alone, 2.5% native, which again, those would probably mostly be Ottawa people, 4.6% Asian.

Josh:
[55:02] 2.9% two or more races, 6.6% Hispanic or Latino, 0.5% black. So it's going to be hard to, I think the angle of we need to have things for everybody in our community is true. The problem is when you're dealing with as homogenous of a community as this is, I think it's very easy for people to take sort of the majoritarian approach and be like, well, doesn't represent most of the community, so why should I care? And again, that's obviously there are various moral and ethical imperatives for that. But it's like, well, how do you I don't I this is the thing that I struggle with a lot is when the appeal is always to the will of the majority. And in this case, it's a majority in this area that is very much the minority. More broadly, you're still able to set up your very small fiefdoms. That's why the Dutch Protestants did what they did in coming over from the Netherlands to Michigan. And I think that getting information out to everybody is important. The problem is that when you have people who will immediately shut down the possibility for that unless it's done on their terms, I don't know how you wrestle that back. I genuinely don't.

Jay:
[56:15] Unions, rank and file stuff, build power, good collection development policies. I don't know. This is why cities don't have public pools.

Josh:
[56:25] I mean, they lost that.

Jay:
[56:27] Public pools disappeared all over the country after integration.

Josh:
[56:41] Have traditionally left libraries alone because of the reverence people have for books, a pseudo-religious reference.

Jay:
[56:47] That comes from Christianity. entity. And because of that, they see libraries as pseudo-religious organizations.

Josh:
[57:44] Funded and then it will be left alone. And that, you know, that might be a good legislative fight to take up in the future. I also think there's something to be said for that. I think that there was a very specific cultural flashpoint regarding libraries and schools specifically that we're not quite there in the same way as we were a couple years ago, which isn't to say that it's not still there. It very much is. And I know you all have firsthand experience with that. But the like moms for liberty stuff they are not ascendant in the way that they were a few years ago and there is that there is that thing of like the most there's recency bias there where it's like the the most recent thing that you remembered is the thing that you need to care about and then once the status quo settles down sometimes you're able to push back and be like well now that this piece of it is settled maybe we don't need the stickers anymore but again i don't know if that works i'm just kind of spitballing here books do get worn out and replaced so it's quite possible that within a.

Jay:
[58:55] Let's just get rid of the rest of them and if if there's high circulation for a couple we'll get new copies I also think a lot of this is just like following the like theory of reproductive futurism. Like this is when the Lee Edelman who lives in my head starts coming out because it's like so much of this is focused on the like hypothetical child capital C trademark, right? Of like, okay, these beautiful little white babies that straight couples need to have in the future.

Jay:
[59:23] And while we're pulling our children out of the public schools because they're a bunch of commies who show them porn. So that's bad. So we do homeschooling, but the public library still exists. And to most people out there, when they think of a public library, they don't think of adults using it. They think of children using the public library. That's what the public library is for. Like every time I go to a fucking conference and there's a keynote and it's an author talking about how magical their public library was when they were a kid and how the children's librarian, no offense to your mom, Josh, was like the greatest person who like ever fucking lived. I like want to shoot myself because libraries are more than just. Wow you want to shoot my mother unbelievable he did say that i i said myself but just god you are on that i just but it's just like people people god people have this idea of public libraries that they are just for children and so like the child loci is like at the public library right now but now it's like moving like well just trans people existing in public is now like where the foci is like the transes are getting your kids and so like maybe it'll move away from libraries in particular but everyone should go read lee edelman and i feel like that will help get on the fuck them kids like mindset it helps i love being a hater and just being like Like, well, I don't care about your stupid, non-existent children who's not alive yet.

Josh:
[1:00:52] That's right. That's right. Speaking of hypothetical children, though, when we were talking about the accepting of the, okay, you want to control what your children read. Well, I want my children to read those books. And the only one who can tell my children what they read is me. And that's also bad. Children, as soon as they have a library card, should have free reign.

Jay:
[1:01:23] For that of like 10 or 13, I agree. But fine, I think children, from the moment they can read it, any book is a kid's book if the kid can read, right? That's the Mitchedberg joke. They won't understand the dirty jokes. It's fine. They won't get it. Or if they're upset by them.

Josh:
[1:01:39] They'll put it away. Right. Kids, self-censor. They're like, I can't be reading about this. It makes me feel weird. I don't like it. And they're not ready for it. But they know to do that. I think that's a really important point, actually. Because I remember reading books when I was younger. And every once in a while, I'd read one where I'd be like, wow, that's and this was not particularly like bad or disturbing stuff. It was just stuff that I wasn't ready for, you know, stuff about, let's say, puberty, for instance, when I was still, I don't know, nine or 10, you know, like a little bit too early and being like, well, this is this is weird for me right now. I'm going to put it away. But one of the great things about growing up Dutch Protestant in the great state of Michigan is that rather than accepting that as, oh, this is a little too early, maybe I can come back to it later, you develop a lifelong complex of guilt because you feel that you are filthy and wrong and you think that the thing that you have read has made you dirty.

Jay:
[1:02:34] People underestimate the Protestant guilt.

Josh:
[1:02:36] Yeah, they always do.

Jay:
[1:02:37] It'll fucking get you.

Josh:
[1:02:38] It's a different kind of guilt from Catholic guilt. It's just entirely different.

Jay:
[1:02:42] We can't get out of it.

Sadie:
[1:02:43] Wait, let's not even get into the Mormon guilt here, man. Oh, my fucking God.

Josh:
[1:02:48] It's not dissimilar. Yeah. From what I've heard, mostly around reproduction is my understanding with the Mormon guilt because it's a fertility cult.

Sadie:
[1:02:56] Yep. Yep. Yeah. Or you could be a kid like me who's like really interested in the Bible. And then if you want to read something spicy, you just read the Song of Solomon again and again.

Josh:
[1:03:06] And you're just like, oh, it says breast. Damn. Damn. Your breasts are like what? Two fawns? come on those those pomegranates i want to grab hold of one of those pomegranates baby come on put that shit in my mouth never.

Sadie:
[1:03:22] Look at a grocery store produce section of the same again.

Josh:
[1:03:26] You want to put my lover is my breast actually at many times in jewish history they tried to remove the song of solomon.

Jay:
[1:03:34] Jay's making a face because i'm talking about the bible uh they tried to Remove it because people would sing the Song of Solomon as a drinking.

Josh:
[1:03:41] Song. Oh, hell yeah. How many y'all are massaging your breasts with myrrh?

Jay:
[1:03:48] If I still had them. Every night. Me with my burr?

Josh:
[1:03:52] I no longer have them. Oh, okay. Well, I guess just your chest more generally. It's whatever. You just kind of take some burr. You throw it on your chest. You feel better?

Jay:
[1:04:00] I have frankincense. Does that count?

Josh:
[1:04:02] It can.

Sadie:
[1:04:02] It can be gender neutral.

Jay:
[1:04:04] Okay. Is that the frankincense poppers?

Josh:
[1:04:06] No.

Jay:
[1:04:07] You just have frankincense. I just have a frankincense oil roller. Oh, nice. I love the smell of frankincense. I also have frankincense soap.

Josh:
[1:04:16] But yeah, I mean, I think like, That that's a very just to go back to the previous point, it's well made that, like, in general, when it comes to framing, because I think framing is so important, you never, ever, ever want to buy into the framing of the opposition. That's it. That's one of the biggest things that we talk about on our show is the way that media frames up the way that you ought to see an issue. And oftentimes it does it in a way that isn't explicit or even apparent. And the moment that it becomes a battle over what should your kids be allowed to do versus what should my kids be allowed to do? What are my parental ethics versus your parental ethics? Then it becomes a culture war thing. Because of course, if you are a liberal parent, your approach to parenting is going to be different from an evangelical Christian. That's not going to be a fruitful. You're never going to be able to find any sort of common ground there because it's impossible to even meet at first principles.

Jay:
[1:05:13] And people just don't understand evangelicals.

Josh:
[1:05:16] No.

Jay:
[1:05:16] They just don't. But it is also like this sort of anti-child way that.

Josh:
[1:05:21] We think about children as well as we think of children as property and as extensions of their parents and, you know, child liberation. So eventually in the.

Jay:
[1:06:43] Will be. But I really hope that it's an uneventful vote. But it does look like they are, you know, they got funds from every library that they are allowed to distribute for different things. They were talking about how they were going to use that money. And this is, you know, I think I have a story in here somewhere of.

Josh:
[1:07:01] That are having, yeah, Alpena Public Library was in Book Riot. Lapeer Public Library in Michigan was also subject to a lot of this kind of stuff.

Jay:
[1:07:11] Yeah, like how has this been affecting your mom?

Josh:
[1:07:13] Well, that's an interesting question because my mom is not at a public library. My mom is the librarian at a Christian school.

Jay:
[1:07:21] Oh.

Josh:
[1:07:21] Oh, and, you know, she is doing her best to work within the constraints of that system, you know, because people are hyper vigilant right now against woke. Right. And at the end of the day, I think as my mom sees it, her primary role is just to, you know, instill a love of reading in kids and give them resources that help them understand their place in this. But it turns out that any children's literature that even alludes to the idea of getting along with people is woke now. And so so it's actually proven quite difficult. I mean, you can see parallels to this in theater as well. Right. Where the Kennedy Center, now that it is fully going to be like giving us whatever the Trump equivalent of Shen Yun is, I'm sure that's going to be really cool.

Jay:
[1:08:08] Just Evita all the time.

Josh:
[1:08:09] Yeah, exactly. The. At the Kennedy Center, they've been canceling programming for children. There was something about a shark that wanted to be friends with other fish. That's woke. Get it out of here.

Jay:
[1:08:23] It's just the movie Shark Tale.

Josh:
[1:08:25] Look, you're telling me. So this is the other thing, I guess, about framing and rhetoric. I do think that there are ways that if you can present literature as something that has the ability to just connect people and tell fun stories, You can get pretty far, but it's always going to run up against a hard limit when it comes to things that are explicitly about gender, about sexuality, about race. And at that point, within this mindset, this mindset that sees anything about that even tangentially has to do with an issue as a threat. that causes people to immediately go into a defensive crouch. And I don't know that there's any way to reason that. I think that you can materially obviously bring about change in your community. There's some power in rhetoric, but at the end of the day, I think some of this does have to come about through sheer political force. I was going to say though, I would love to have your mom on the podcast. I know that would probably be a non-starter, but I wanted to do Yeah, I'm going to do a church libraries episode, and I suppose thinking now Christian schools as well, because I would love to talk about church libraries, modern church libraries. We jump churches a lot. I don't really understand why. My grandfather was just very particular about where he wanted to go, and he was one.

Josh:
[1:09:52] Not a common thing. And so wherever he went, he was in a position of leadership because he was funding that bitch. Sure. So he was always a deacon at every church we went to immediately because he.

Jay:
[1:10:37] Transported into this world where this narrator was and he wore like a turban or whatever, and he would tell them Bible stories.

Josh:
[1:10:44] This like creepy strange man would tell you Bible stories.

Jay:
[1:10:47] And then it would switch to the animation for the Bible stories. Like if anyone's gonna know it's gonna be josh that's kind of that's kind of why i brought it up because.

Josh:
[1:10:55] Um okay so i don't that that sounds kind of like something which i'm pretty sure is different which was a vhs series called secret adventures in which there was a girl who was like a babysitter and then she had two little kids who were in her charge and then they would imagine what it was like to be like i don't know fish or whatever and then they would learn a lesson because that would be in the world of animation. And then the lesson that they learned in the animated world would help them out in real life. And so in this episode that I'm thinking of, the babysitter was running for class president at her school, but she was basically telling scurrilous rumors about her competitor, the other candidate that she was running against. And then they learned in the world of under the sea that if you tell rumors, then a shark kills you or something. It always seems to come back.

Jay:
[1:11:47] To sharks for some reason i don't know i don't know.

Josh:
[1:11:50] That shark was not woke that shark was not woke that.

Jay:
[1:11:54] Was not a shark no.

Josh:
[1:11:55] That shark was telling scurrilous rumors.

Jay:
[1:11:59] And ate you yeah i yeah i always wonder you know how.

Josh:
[1:12:25] Library worker podcast, I think. Maybe I can get a universalist to come on, but they're just going to be hippy-dippy at me, and that's not what I'm looking for. Yeah, UU is sort of its whole own thing.

Jay:
[1:12:32] I know so many people in Massachusetts who grew up UU, and I'm like, no.

Josh:
[1:12:37] I've had literal nightmares about getting stuck in UU services.

Jay:
[1:12:41] Oh, God.

Josh:
[1:12:42] Like, actual nightmares, where it's just like they're reading some fucking thing from, I don't know, James Madison being like, and people can work together. It's like, thanks. Shut up.

Jay:
[1:12:53] It's like when I went out to the Bay Area and it made me feel conservative. I'm like, this is just too much.

Josh:
[1:13:00] Well, yeah. They're too woke out there is the thing.

Jay:
[1:13:03] They're too woke out there. I need to calm down a little bit.

Josh:
[1:13:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Go, go, go. Calm down. Eat some pomegranates. Rub a little bit of frankincense on you.

Jay:
[1:13:14] Get some myrrh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh:
[1:13:16] I got a new strap-on harness.

Jay:
[1:13:19] Oh, God. Do you know this josh.

Josh:
[1:13:23] No i mean i didn't i i didn't know that you got that but thank you for the information i.

Jay:
[1:13:28] Can't wait to have your cock in my mouth.

Josh:
[1:13:31] I'm going to give you.

Jay:
[1:13:32] The blow job of your life blow job such great it's like senator or something.

Josh:
[1:13:38] Reading aloud some like challenged books okay so that hearing that is always my favorite thing is when especially when you get like the the like moms who like break down in tears because there's a book that has the word cock in it and they can't handle it and it's just and that's i guess that's the only other thing that i wanted to say is that the people who end up pushing these sorts of bands forward the reason that they do it is that they are fundamentally uncomfortable with something about themselves that that's that's what it comes down and sometimes it's their gender sometimes it's their sexuality sometimes it's that they've always wanted to do something or see something but were never able to, and so they want to make sure that nobody else can have that experience. But It all fundamentally comes down to this desire to make sure that nobody can experience the thing that makes them afraid.

Jay:
[1:14:27] Yeah, it's like, I had to learn this, so you have to learn this. I got married at 18 and didn't get to live my life until I, That kind of story that happens quite a lot, quite honestly. Practice saying cock while you're doing the dishes. Just like, come in, that'll help.

Josh:
[1:14:47] So, I don't know. Maybe that's one other practical strategy. I don't know how practical it is, but just on an interpersonal level, just like getting it takes a lot of work. And it's not something that I'm personally equipped to do in my day to day life because I have too much of too much shit going on in my own life. But like, see how much of what people are saying is just the first barrier, the first line of defense. And then by listening, try to actually get in there and see what's really going on, because that's going to take that's a lot of work. That's very hard. It's not for most people. And like I said, it's definitely not for me. But that's something that you can do outside of the more material. It's like organizing stuff. There is research on this. And one of the things that is quite common is, what's called a worldview defense, which is a person will listen to you until you say something that directly challenges something they hold unchangeable about themselves. And the moment that activates, the conversation's kind of over. The good news is.

Jay:
[1:15:52] There's also research that shows that repeated exposure to ideas that are different than them do.

Josh:
[1:16:05] People can change. people change throughout their whole life it's not over till it's over you know you know what might be a place for people to engage in stuff like that would be a local library just just just spitballing i'm.

Jay:
[1:16:17] Sure there's a book or two that says cock in there.

Josh:
[1:16:19] Maybe yeah in these unprecedented times i hope so the new testament exactly.

Jay:
[1:16:26] And it says ass and it has incest in there i was in a christian band called balaam's ass they made it change they made them you were They made him change it to.

Josh:
[1:16:36] Balaam's donkey That sounds No, Balaam's ass is a good name Balaam's donkey is not I know, That sounds like a Depeche Mode cover band for some reason. It's probably not, but I would listen to a Depeche Mode cover band called Balaam's Ass.

Jay:
[1:16:50] It was fun. T made it really easy for me to do Depeche Mode at karaoke, so I think we can make this happen.

Josh:
[1:16:56] It's fun, right?

Jay:
[1:16:57] Yeah. All right. Well, that's everything I had in the notes. Josh, do you want to tell people where they can find you and what's.

Josh:
[1:17:06] Coming up next for you? Sure. Well, yeah, no, I first of all, thank y'all so much for having me on. This is something that I've been wanting to talk about for a long time, but I just wasn't sure where to do it. So it was like, oh, a library podcast. Perfect. I co-host a podcast called The Worst of All Possible Worlds. Every week we talk about a different piece of media and we talk about the narratives within it, the explicit ones, the implicit ones, and just in general, how those media narratives shape the world that we live in. We cover a whole range of stuff where, you know, video games, movies, TV shows, the theater, pretty much you name it. We've probably covered something connected to something that you like. So you can check us out wherever you get your podcasts. Worstpossible.world is our website. And we also have a Patreon, patreon.com slash worstofall, where you can get access to our premium episodes for the very affordable price of $5 a month. But if you're debating between that $5 and, I don't know, donating $5 to somebody in your community, please donate it to somebody in your community. Find a library you can donate it to, you know? Yeah, which reminds me, this is the first episode since we did the Library Punk one-year fundraiser.

Josh:
[1:18:25] Helps us keep the show running. And it's really made, it's really taken a whole load off my mind. Yeah, give the good hosts of this show your money. Do it. If you haven't already done it, do it. Just, I'm going to say it. Somebody's got to say it. Give them your money.

Jay:
[1:18:39] We never ask for money. We just like give shit away for free. We have like free stencils and everything. That's very librarian coded of you yeah yeah we're like fuck the police here's this for free we're gonna do consciousness raising you know and so we were like do we do a fundraiser, it was it was really because violet fox reached out as soon as she heard that i was unemployed.

Josh:
[1:19:01] And said hey do you need a fundraiser running i'll promote it and everything i said no no let me let me think about it for a little bit and i was like you know what'd be nice to cover is just the podcast.

Jay:
[1:19:12] Bills for all of that. I was like, let's do this. Let's cover this for the next year. Over the course of a year, it's really not. It's also not too expensive.

Josh:
[1:19:24] No, but it's more than it should be.

Jay:
[1:19:27] Especially we don't use it to its full extent. We do it so that we don't have to do the clappy thing. Anyway, thank you, Josh.

Josh:
[1:19:35] So much for coming on. Thank you for having me again. Thank you all. This has been a delight.

Jay:
[1:19:39] And thank your mom.

Josh:
[1:19:40] Okay.

Jay:
[1:19:41] She's out there fighting the good fight. Shouts out to your mom.

Josh:
[1:19:44] Shout outs to Josh's mom. Let's go. Shout outs to my grandma, my dearly departed grandma. Also a children's librarian who I just discovered. There are some writings of hers that are also available at a library that I wasn't aware of. So I'm going to be getting on that shit soon too. Very exciting.

Jay:
[1:20:01] Hell yeah. Let us know. Keep us updated.

Josh:
[1:20:03] It was her, her, her, her ladies Christian writing club. Ooh.

Jay:
[1:20:08] Ooh. like that must be to be a fly on the wall all right good night.