That’s the headline of an op-ed in the Union Leader. The author, James Garvin, is offended by the idea that the Trump Administration would put the entire Institute of Museum and Library Services staff on leave.
The entire who?
IMLS is the only federal agency dedicated to libraries and is also a crucial source of funding for museums. IMLS administers federal grants to state libraries and also makes direct individual grants to exemplary library and museum initiatives. Many New Hampshire institutions have been awarded IMLS grants. Without staff to administer the current grants, most will probably be terminated.
…
This threat to our free access to ideas and human expression represents the moment when Americans must recognize and defeat this deliberate assault upon our essential humanity.
I’ll assume James has no Internet or does not understand that the IMLS doesn’t have any of these ideas, nor is it the keeper of human expression. Its job is to consume resources in the name of allocating other people’s money based on its priorities.
This is after paying dozens or scores of people (plus the cost of benefits, office space, heat, lights, equipment, taxes, facility insurance, and upkeep) who’s abrupt “administrative leave” has offended. How many other things might people do with that many millions when it is no longer spent on pencil pushers reading grant proposals in some DC office space? Are making those decisions jobs local citizens won’t do, or is there some risk that their priorities might not mirror those of the IMLS or perhaps even James Garvin?
The dissolution of IMLS is a direct attempt to suffocate the institutions that give citizens access to intellectual and inspirational sustenance. Libraries and museums arm us as a free people by collecting, preserving, and sharing the breadth of human thought, opinion, and expression. These institutions are our defense against ignorance, repression, and domination by enemies of the natural rights of human beings.
Are they? It’s strange how we managed a proper revolution to escape tyranny and become a more literate and tolerant people for centuries before the IMLS came along.
And while acknowledging that James may not have chosen the title, the current battlespace over libraries exists because the political left decided they would use them to advance a fringe, partisan social and cultural agenda. Everyone was happy with their local library until it started inviting cross-dressing autogynophiles to read books to children.
They liked or were indifferent to the artifact of a building with a selection of books you could borrow, but that was before librarians decided to utilize limited shelf space for titles directed at kids that promoted adult-child sex, drug use, suicide, cutting, smoking, sexual assault, or depicted cartoon images of sexual acts. Libraries were a vestigial social good until they decided that preferring something other than grooming lit was book banning when whatever those books replaced was not.
As ibraries and their not so civilized advocates label parents or taxpayers who object to this age-inappropriate material being accessible to minors as bigots and compare them to Nazi book burners.
What civilized nations do that?
Our libraries have been undermining themselves for years, and they are the only ones to blame. It is also worth noting that under Federal Executive Order, the IMLS would not be allowed to fund any library that included naughty books or used DEI in any form to hire or retain staff.
In other words, most of them have already defunded themselves. A risk you take when you rely on the general government for resources that will always be tied to national political will, not local public interest.
Finally, if the IMLS’s mission is so important, why not ask George Soros or one of the other progressive oligarchs to fund libraries and museums? Divert some of the money used to pay people to burn Teslas or to show up at protests or Hands Off Rallies for the greater public good. Or are you afraid someone like Elon Musk might fund libraries and that he’d prefer library advocates not to spend his money grooming other people’s children?
